Health Care Is Better as a Game

Kim BellardSo many counter-intuitive findings recently.  For example, a new study claims 7 of the 10 most profitable hospitals in the country are "non-profit."  Let me say that again, most profitable hospitals in the country are usually nonprofit.  Or, despite the drive to improve surgical quality by limiting surgeries at low volume hospitals, it appears that the relationship between volume and patient outcomes is not as clear as had been thought, once "more advanced statistical modeling" is used to analyze the data.  Wait, what?

Either one of these would be a good topic to write about, and many others have done so already (e.g., KHN and Modern Healthcare, respectively).  Instead, I'll talk about something equally counter-intuitive but more fun: how important games might be for health care.

Let's start with what's going on with tuberculous.  About one-third of the world's population is infected with TB (many of whom don't know it).  It is one of the leading infectious disease killers.  Surprisingly, though, it is not particularly easy to diagnose, and researchers at Stanford think a video game could help with that.

The game is Eterna Medicine.  The first version of Eterna was released five years ago, and it allows anyone to try to design bio-molecules.  Seriously.   Apparently learning to fold RNA molecules can be fun, a real-life kind of puzzle, Something like 100,000 players have tried it so far.  As one of them, Jeff Anderson-Lee, told NPR: "You can start out not knowing any of the science.  You start to get a sense for what things go together to make an RNA design fold the way you want.  While you're doing that, you're gaining points and rising in rank."

Fun or not, it has proved to be meaningful.  In February, Mr. Anderson-Lee and fellow gamers used their Eterna learnings to publish an article (check it out: "Principles for Predicting RNA Secondary Structural Design Difficulty") in Journal of Molecular Biology, an eminently legitimate, peer-reviewed scientific journal.  It is believed to be the first such "citizen scientist" publication, although it probably will not be the last.

As Peter Venkman might say, "no studying."

With Eterna Medicine, the goal is to try to figure out what particular configuration of RNA designs is most likely to mark the presence of TB.  Players "vote" on designs, and the winning designs will actually get synthesized to see if they work.  If they do, testing for TB could become as easy as using a home pregnancy test.

The Wall Street Journal profiled not just Eterna but also several other game approaches to health care research.  These include:
 

• EyeWire, which maps neural connections in a mouse's retina;
• Phylo, which cross-indexes disease-related DNA sequences;
• Project Discovery/Eve Online, which classifies human cell proteins.