Ask the Expert: How to Create a Successful Mobile Health Gamification Experience | Healthcare IT Solutions

What are the first steps a healthcare organization should make when considering a gaming strategy?

An organization should start with their business goals.  Sometimes organizations want to dive straight into focusing on behaviors and less on the actual results.  This can become difficult when they need to have that practical conversation with the CFO to justify budget.  The guidance I give to new customers is to establish goals and understand the metrics that show we are on the right track with those goals; that’s the only way you will actually know that your gamification project is a true success.   Once these goals and metrics have been accessed, we then help clients identify the correct behaviors that need to be targeted and how to engage consumers around those behaviors.  For example, in the case of AviviaHealth.com, healthy employees are an asset for a company.  We came up with a gamified experience that helped those employees to become more healthful as a result.

I was interviewed recently by Melody Smith-Jones of the Perficient Health Care team. They do a really fantastic job of moderating and creating a lot of awareness for their Healthcare IT Practice.

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How Gamification of the Enterprise can kill the Dilbert-Comics

Organizations in general tend to be bad in measuring who their best employees are. Games on the contrary tell you precisely who the best gamers are. With games, everybody knows who the best gamers are. With games, you know how you yourself can become better and what the rules and the paths are to join the roster of successful gamers. Nobody tells a gamer only once a year in a performance feedback meeting how well he/she fared. The feedback is immediate. And it is a feedback that is implicit and explicit. It comes from the system and from other gamers, it’s designed into the game as well as encourages others to express feedback. Successful gamers are being promoted to the next level, to a guild leader and receive status badges and rewards. Players in World of Warcraft know exactly what a level 70 priest had to do and achieve in order to come to such a position. And that gives a level 70 priest the right street-cred from the other players.

Good post from my friend Mario over at SAP.