Patients aren’t the only ones who are poised to benefit from gamification in healthcare.
In between rounds at hospitals like Mayo Clinic and Baylor College of Medicine, clinicians are answering quiz questions and participating in challenges on their cell phones and tablets. Their hospitals are working with a Harvard spinoff called Qstream to encourage continuous learning and training among their care teams.
“Our co-founder got into this looking at medical education and asking, is this actually working? And he discovered that people are forgetting most of (the material),” said Duncan Lennox, QStream’s CEO. “That led him down the road of saying, what if we instead looked at it from the point of neuroscience and psychology? Can we build a system more aligned with how that works?”
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QStream’s strategy is simple: Rather than “brain dumping” information on clinicians or medical students, it works with hospitals to deliver a set of scenario-based questions to their mobile devices over spaced intervals of time. The questions can be multiple choice, check-all-that-apply, fill-in-the-blank or open-ended, and are usually developed by the client facility. The idea is for the clinicians and students to spend just 3 to 5 minutes a day learning and refreshing their memories on critical skills by answering the questions.
Pediatric faculty at Baylor, for example, developed a set of questions on a range of primary care issues that were sent out a few at a time, every other day, to pediatric residents. To encourage participation, Qstream integrated game elements into its platform so users can score points, land on leader boards and see how their colleagues are doing.
The algorithm behind the platform shuffles and changes the content that people see based on how they’re doing. At Baylor, the residents needed to answer each question correctly at least twice before it was removed from their question queue.
The platform is based on an interval reinforcement technique developed and studied by Dr. B. Price Kerfoot, an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. Kerfoot and his Harvard colleagues have run more than a dozen randomized trials of the technique in various countries and specialties, where it’s demonstrated an ability to improve long-term knowledge retention and change behavior.
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Lennox said the area of patient safety has been a big priority for hospital clients recently. “The idea is to make sure that staff, and not just clinical staff, understands policies and regulations and procedures – for something as simple as hand hygiene to various other quality metric projects.”
On the back-end, faculty or supervisors can keep tabs on how the participants are doing. QStream’s analytics allow them to measure how much scores have improved over baseline, identify problem areas and pick out users who are struggling in a particular area.
Although it was developed with healthcare in mind, Lennox said that as Qstream progressed toward commercialization, the team realized it had something much bigger – it had an effective, efficient and fun way to learn anything. Today the platform is also used as a salesforce education tool by a host of retail, financial services and technology companies.
It’s also got a solid clientele of life science companies, including Intuitive Surgical and Boehringer Ingelheim. “Clinicians can get a lot of information online, so it’s harder in today’s world for a drug rep to add value to a physician,” Lennox explained. “They need to be up to date on the latest clinical research, and a lot of that is very difficult material.”
QStream offers its mobile service via an annual subscription charged per-user. According to Lennox, it’s serving customers in 12 languages and sent out some 200 million questions last year. It works in the mobile medical education sector alongside companies like Epocrates and Nearpod.
The Burlington, Mass., company was founded in 2008 and is backed by Frontline Ventures, Launchpad Venture Group, Delta Partners and Enterprise Ireland.
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