Writing result-oriented ad copy is difficult, as it must appeal to, entice, and convince consumers to take action.
In 2012, Tom Chamberlain, PharmD, founded EdLogics, our gamified health education platform. Recently he shared how he first got the idea from working with patients, and the results so far.
Right. As a PharmD and an entrepreneur, I’ve been involved in starting and growing a number of companies, all of them focused on healthcare education and improving the utilization of healthcare services. My primary objective has always been to improve clinical outcomes and reduce healthcare costs for consumers and payors of healthcare services.
I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to manage my own patients during my doctor of pharmacy program and residency training. Having firsthand experience treating patients with chronic conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, and COPD, I knew the challenges of educating and engaging patients in the self-management of their conditions. Traditional educational strategies such as pamphlets and printouts weren’t effective in teaching patients what they needed to know to improve their conditions.
For people with diabetes, testing blood sugar is a routine part of managing their condition. If you’re injecting insulin or using a pump, you may have to test several times a day. Without accurate blood sugar tests, you might not get the right amount of insulin at the right times.
If you can’t measure your blood sugar, you can’t control it. And if you can’t control your blood sugar, you raise your risk of amputations, heart attacks, blindness, erectile dysfunction, and many other problems. One immediate risk is diabetic ketoacidosis, which comes on quickly and can be fatal. Even if you survive, your ER trip will cost thousands of dollars. And it all can be avoided with appropriate education.
Many patients seem to understand how to check their blood sugar once someone shows them. But it was clear to me that most of my patients had forgotten what they’d learned by their next visit. They still weren’t retaining the information needed to manage their diabetes.
This happened over and over again – and similar scenarios occurred with a number of patients with various chronic conditions. I realized we’d never be able to help our patients if we couldn’t find a better way to teach them what to do.
Yes, but a lot of people aren’t familiar with the term. Here’s one definition:
“Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.”
Or to put it more simply:
“Health literacy means you can find and understand the information you need to make good decisions about your health.”
Low health literacy is now recognized as a critical barrier to effective and efficient healthcare. It’s an enormous problem, and the consequences are far-reaching. For instance, did you know that compared to patients with adequate health literacy, patients with low health literacy have:
In fact, the cost of low health literacy in the US is somewhere between $106 billion and $238 billion per year. It’s unreal!
If we want to improve health outcomes and lower healthcare costs, we need a way to reach consumers – a way that works for them long term.
Since I started working in the healthcare industry, the concept of health literacy has matured into an academic discipline. Institutions like Vanderbilt University have devoted teams of talented experts and researchers—like Russell Rothman, MD, MPP, arguably one of the top health literacy experts in the world—to help healthcare providers, employers, payors, and the public understand the implications of low health literacy—and develop effective solutions to address this major healthcare issue.
At EdLogics, we’ve teamed up with many leading academic medical centers and Centers of Excellence (CoE), as well as industry thought leaders like Dr. Rothman and former US Secretary of Health and Human Services Governor Tommy Thompson, to identify specific ways to improve health literacy.
The first step is to make learning fun and engaging. To do this, we employ and work with experienced clinicians, developers, designers, and gamification experts to create stimulating, engaging games that educate users on important health topics, from diabetes to the Zika virus, all developed with the low health literate user in mind.
To keep users coming back, we’ve developed innovative gamification and unique incentive strategies where users earn rewards by playing games and completing educational activities.
Employers can purchase a customized version of the platform, enabling employees and their families to play, learn, and win. And the cost is minimal: roughly $20 a year per family.
I’m very proud of our platform. It’s a product that educates consumers about chronic diseases, common medical conditions, general health, well-being, medications, and how to navigate the healthcare system. We’ve heard inspiring testimonials from employers and employees, and we have impressive statistics on knowledge improvement and consumer engagement. In fact, 100% of users improve their knowledge of a given condition after completing our learning activities, and 79% of users say they will change their behavior based on what they learned.
We’re continuously making enhancements, all with a focus on improving consumer engagement. That’s the key to being able to influence positive behavior change and deliver the most important, lifesaving knowledge. Not to mention the opportunity to reduce pain and suffering – both physical and financial.
A version of this article was originally published on 2/22/2017.
ecently, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, issued some harsh criticism of social networks in an interview on Axios.
He claims they work to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology” and that those networks will eventually “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.” He claims the networks do this by creating a system to generate addictive loops that “sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.”
It's very powerful and used by all of the major social media sites which continue to grow and consume our time and attention.
But what if we could take those same techniques Facebook used to grow to over 2 billion active users a month and applied them to something positive, like health education?
Recently, Tom Chamberlain, PharmD, CEO and Founder of EdLogics, gave a presentation to the Global Action Summit on the gamification of health. In his presentation, Dr. Chamberlain described various types of gaming technologies, such as video games, mobile apps, virtual reality, augmented reality, and interactive learning, and how they are being used in the medical field.
Chamberlain went on to discuss the key principles of gamification, including instant rewards, milestones, status, and competition. He described how a “little dopamine hit” is generated through playing these games and through the use of gamification technologies.
Driving engagement and facilitating behavior changes are the “holy grails” of health improvement programs. If we can get individuals, employees, plan members, and/or communities more engaged in understanding and acting on their own health, we can see vast improvements in a population’s health and lowered costs. This is why applying gamification principles to health education is so exciting.
Low health literacy is associated with poor health outcomes and higher costs. It’s pretty clear that if a person does not understand their health, their health issues, the healthcare system, or their health insurance, they won’t be able to maintain or improve their health, select the right provider, adhere to treatment, and more.
These approaches are not just fun and games when it comes to health — they are using real science in an effort to drive behavior change and improve one’s life.
If you’d like more information on the EdLogics platform for your employees, health plan or as a broker/consultant, please contact us.
A version of this article was originally published 11/11/2017.
Mr. Garcia is a 65-year-old man with prediabetes.
He’s just retired and moved to a new area. At his first visit with his new primary care doctor, a nurse asks if he can usually understand a doctor’s instructions.
“Absolutely,” he says. “I understand perfectly.”
But does he really?
Situations like this highlight the importance of measuring two kinds of health literacy — how much a patient thinks they know compared to how much they actually know. If doctors measure just one kind of health literacy, they may not realize how much a patient understands and how well they can follow basic health advice..
Better understanding might allow Mr. Garcia to act sooner. He might get treatment or make healthier choices — and avoid diabetes. Smart changes now could mean avoiding the pain and expense of a chronic health problem later.
That’s why, when possible, it’s best to measure both subjective and objective health literacy.
Subjective health literacy measures how health literate someone thinks they are.
You can gauge subjective health literacy with questions like:
“How confident are you in filling out medical forms by yourself?”
The nurse in the story above was measuring subjective health literacy, albeit informally. The questions don’t have objectively correct answers, which may feel less threatening to the patient. It doesn’t feel like a test you’d take in school.
But there are disadvantages too. People often overestimate their own ability. And they may tell you what they think you want to hear. In other words, they may report strong health literacy even if they rarely understand or act on what a doctor tells them.
A patient has to actually demonstrate factual knowledge to measure objective health literacy. One popular tool, The Newest Vital Sign, shows the patient a nutrition label and asks how many calories they’d get by eating multiple servings, as well as other basic questions.
With objective health literacy, you know patients aren’t overestimating their own ability, or telling you what they think you want to hear. But because there are right and wrong answers, some patients feel like they’re back in school, and the memories aren’t always pleasant.
EdLogics measures — and strives to cultivate — improvements in both kinds of health literacy.
We use only validated surveys. When we measure objective health literacy, we present questions a little differently, making them fun, adding graphics, and incorporating great design. It’s all gamified and has fun incentives to encourage continued engagement. You can even win cash drawings, where the more you play, the more likely you are to win.
Users do not feel like they’re back in school.
By measuring both types of health literacy, we put ourselves in the best position to understand how health literacy changes over time. This can help us further refine our suite of health literacy education games, and be even more effective in our mission to improve health literacy.
A version of this article was originally published 7/6/2017.
