Gaming Medical Education
This week I am talking to Eric Gantwerker, MD (@DrEricGant) a pediatric ENT-otolaryngologist and also a Vice President, Medical Director at Level Ex – a gaming company focused on tapping into gaming technology for medicine and healthcare.
You can get a sense of the technology from their introductory video for CardioEx
which is available for free download for Apple devices. I have tried it and its an immersive experience available on your personal phone that puts you in control as the interventional cardiologists performing cardiac catheterization.
Eric spent the early part of his career and research focused on education and the positive impact technology can bring to improve the learning environment which as he describes has not changed much from the original Flexner report (archived in PDF form here) from 1910! The report was revisited in the NEJM article from 2006: American Medical Education 100 Years after the Flexner Report which highlighted how little progress had been made in the past 100 years.
With medical knowledge doubling every 73 days how we teach and indeed what we learn has to change. Listen in to hear Eric’s incremental steps for improving medical education that included an Audience Response System (polling) that is front-loaded in all is sessions where he sees himself more as a facilitator and orchestrator vs the traditional “Sage on the Stage”
Listen in to hear him talk about the importance of considering the return on investment to the student of education that is not measured in money but rather in value for the time spent and how this links to the highly successful flow state that gaming has managed to induce in millions of fee-paying players. They have perfected the use of psychological techniques to keep people interested and engaged and we can and should do the same in medical education and ongoing education in healthcare.
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Joe BormelBee On June 14, 2019 at 3:31 pm
Thanks Dr Nick.
After reading your post, I read a link you provided:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3116346/pdf/tacca122000048.pdf
The idea of re-thinking medical education in terms of “complaint-based” versus Organ and discipline made a lot of sense (and was not how I was educated in med school.) The idea of having a strategy for reinforcement was also new. As I prepare for my re-certification, I’m pleased to see that med students are using resources like Anki to get facilitated “spaced repetition”. All we need to do now is to put sleep assurance into medical training and we’ll be using science to teach science. 🙂