Serious Games for Healthcare: Building a Library for Clinicians and Educators

Integrating Serious Games and Simulation scholarship and patient care strategy

Via: Games & Simulation for Healthcare Portal - Games & Simulation for Healthcare Library and Database


Games & Simulation for Healthcare website aims to provide a portal and network to meet the needs of clinicians, researchers and educators in the healthcare community who want to integrate Serious Games and Simulation into their scholarship and patient care strategy.

Sponsored by the University of Wisconsin- Madison, the Games & Simulation for Healthcare portal was started in fall 2008 as an experiment in pulling together diverse resources about the game and simulation world as it applies to healthcare education and practice.

This resource also welcomes healthcare consumers, advocates, and others interested in patient and clinician education, and clinical research taking advantage of Serious Games and simulation-based learning.

Project Team gurus are:

Eric B. Bauman PhD, RN – content guru
UW-Madison

Allan R. Barclay MLIS, AHIP – web/technical guru
UW-Madison

Aurel Mihai - associate content guru
EMSTAT Center – Upstate Medical University

Emily Rose Schaefer – guru in training
UW-Madison student

Sam Seider – guru in training, level 2
UW-Madison student, second year helping with project

Lindsay Young – guru in training
UW-Madison student

Gaura Saini – emeritus guru in training (UW-Madison student, helped during first year of project

The case for action was built upon seven key background presumptions about Healthcare Serious Games & Sims issues: unclear definitions, categories; different uses, audiences for the same thing; technical requirements, environments; not-published like books & journals; not- published=not-indexed or organized; not-organized=not-easily found, evaluated; not-found=not used.

The solution the project team has come up with was the creation of a flexible inventory which is made available via the Games & Simulation for Healthcare portal. The project team started by collecting low-hanging fruit titles, using very basic categories:

• For Clinicians and Healthcare Providers
• For Patients and Consumers

They’ve also used existing website tools from Ebling Library for initial mock-ups.

The portal allows for browsing games & sims inventory, searching inventory by vendor, audience, platform or topic and finding the most recent additions to the inventory.