Physicians at every stage of their careers have competing demands on their time and attention. For busy residents participating in a new activity, not only do they need to carve out a few minutes, but they must also invest their mental energy and buy into the experience. That is where gamification—the use in nongame settings of elements such as rewards, challenges, points and leaderboards—can help.
When Saqib Baig, MD, MS, a pulmonologist with Jefferson Health in Philadelphia and an avid video game player, thought about how to innovate in graduate medical education (GME), he naturally thought about using the power of gameplay to do so.
“There’s something about video games that feeds off of intrinsic motivation that makes you want to play,” he said. “Gamification principles allow you to elevate an activity to a point where you no longer are being forced to do something. Rather, you just want to do something. And there has been a push towards gamification in all aspects of life, medical education being one of them.”
Dr. Baig specializes in pulmonary critical care and has spent about eight years as faculty of pulmonary and critical care medicine with Jefferson Health, part of the AMA Health System Member Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
The topic that Dr. Baig and his colleague, Vincent Chan, MD, took on was one of the complications inherent in medical rounds. What they invented—a game called Round34—would lead to the publication of research exploring how gamification might be able to improve GME, residency training and medicine as a whole.
Dr. Baig was the lead author of a study, “Round34: Attending-Moderated Tabletop Gameplay to Enhance Resident Team Dynamics During Inpatient Rounds,” published earlier this year in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education. The other authors were Dr. Chan, Michael Q. Dong, MD, and Shruti Sirapu.
The game was envisioned as a way to accelerate the integration process in rounding, which might include a group of people who have had few or no interactions with each other previously. At first, there may be discomfort or uncertainty, Dr. Baig said, that must be overcome to provide great patient care.
“This game can help lower the initial barrier that people might feel when they start on a team,” he said. Round34 or other games like it can facilitate education “while also stimulating relationships that include a little laughter, a little looseness, so that the junior-most person has spoken already because of the game. That person no longer feels intimidated, [thinking] that: Hey, I can’t speak. They don't have to be that much in their head, essentially.”
A shortcut to connection
The study took place over 22 weeks in 2024. During that time, inpatient internal medicine teams at Jefferson Health’s academic medical center were randomly assigned to either a control group or one that played Round34 during teaching rounds.
Every day, the residents in the groups answered questions on a survey about the educational value of the rounds that day, their engagement and their comfort in asking questions during rounds. The residents also completed weekly surveys on burnout, well-being and loneliness. Researchers tracked the amount of time rounds took during the study period.
The study found that residents who played Round34 reported experiencing higher educational value, more engagement and more comfort during rounds. And, critically, the game did not increase rounding time.
In the following news article, residents will learn:
- What else the research shows about residents who played Round34 during rounds.
- How Round34 is played.
- Where connection and performance intersect in residency training.
- What gamification might be able to do for GME.
