Has your organization reviewed its customer experience strategy lately? Are you looking at touch points?
mHealth + Gamification To Battle Liver Disease
In May of 2016, the El Paso Times published a series of articles detailing the extent of liver disease in the El Paso-area Hispanic population. This led The Hospitals of Providence, an El Paso-area health system to collaborate with the newspaper and a gamification software company to develop an online trivia game focused on liver disease.
The newspaper series revealed that more Hispanics in the El Paso area died each year from liver disease than from lung or breast cancer. It also found that the county’s death rate from liver disease was twice as high as the state average in 2013. As liver disease is often preventable, hospital officials decided to follow the lead of other providers who have used online tools and interactive games to target specific populations to provide information about disease prevention.
An online trivia game on liver health topics was developed. It includes educational videos, links to a podcast and infographics on liver disease. As of early January, the game has been played more than 3,000 times on mobile devices and computers.
The gamification software company, OfferCraft, plans to develop more mHealth games in the future. Aron Ezra, CEO of OfferCraft, says, “While this game deals with liver disease, in the future we aim to release new games to provide important information about many other diseases. Making education about a tough subject less intimidating and more memorable can help improve health and save lives.”
What is your organization doing towards population health efforts? Do you have a gamification story to share?
Can Wearables Indicate Impending Illness?
By closely tracking data patterns from wearable devices, it may be possible to detect when a person is getting sick, according to new research from PLOS Biology.
The research team, led by geneticist Dr. Michael Snyder at Stanford University, looked at 2 billion measurements taken from 60 study participants. The measurements included weight, heart rate, skin temperature, sleep, blood oxygen levels, physical activity, caloric burn and exposure to gamma rays and x-rays, and were measured by one or more of seven commercially-available activity trackers. Baseline data for each participant was established at the beginning of the study. The researchers found that data patterns deviated from the established norm for each participant in situations such as changes in environmental conditions (flying in an airplane, etc.), illness or other factors affecting health.
Specific health observations that were detected by the wearables:
- Onset of Lyme disease and inflammation
- Physiological differences between insulin-sensitive and insulin-resistant individuals, which may help to identify those at risk for type 2 diabetes
The researchers say, “Overall, these results indicate that portable biosensors provide useful information for monitoring personal activities and physiology and are likely to play an important role in managing health and enabling affordable health care access to groups traditionally limited by socioeconomic class or remote geography.”
Has your organization looked at using wearables to track patient health status?