Ten years after Robert Wood Johnson Foundation allocated grant funding to support the Games for Health Project, it’s coming to an end. Next year the annual Games for Health conference may be held as part of the annual HIMSS conference starting next April in Chicago, according to a source familiar with the project.
In a phone interview with MedCity News, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Program Officer Paul Tarini said that although it had no fixed timeframe when it began funding the Games for Health in 2004, it is not foundation practice to fund things in perpetuity. “When we made the decision two years ago or so to wind down funding, it was based on the assessment we made that this space had come very far…The field doesn’t need the kind of nurturing that our funding was able to support [ anymore].”
It’s fair to say the sector has come a long way. If you were to look for examples of gamification 10 years ago, you’d probably be more likely to find a military simulator than anything else. But fast forward a decade or you see a lot of diversity in this area from a zombie attack to improve understanding of pandemics, simulators to help new nurses and physicians gain confidence in doing physical exams by interacting with patients to identifying signs of the Ebola virus. Companies such as Ayogo have designed games to help people with chronic conditions make better decisions about their health.
There has also been widespread adoption of gamification technologies by companies centered on employer wellness such as Audax Health, in which UnitedHealthcare took a majority stake earlier this year, Mango Health, and companies that use a videogame format to encourage patients to do physical therapy at home to help recovery or exercise as part of a care plan. There are also some interesting simulator platforms to help patients better understand their condition. Many of these are highlighted in a Health IT Consultant article that listed 16 healthcare gamification startups to watch this year.
Pharmaceutical companies have also been interested in doing pilots with gamification companies, such as Pfizer though there’s still some debate about pharma’s longterm commitment to this space beyond pilot programs.
On the plus side, this could be an opportunity to breathe new life into the Games for Health brand. “If you think where we are today compared with where we were 10 years ago, I’m impressed by how much is happening in the space,” Tarini added.
