Corporate

CHEST

Using games to change the stigma of a COPD drug.

The Game Agency was approachable, creative, and flexible when it came to collaborating on our latest educational game, Dr. Neb. When we built out Dr. Neb using the Scenarios template we were delighted by The Game Agency's willingness to brainstorm beyond the template, explore new, technically challenging gaming features, and ultimately execute our ideas with a high degree of polish. The TGA can-do attitude is the perfect match for clients looking to develop innovative educational games!

Christina Lorenzo

Senior eLearning Instructional Designer

CHEST (American College of Chest Physicians)

Client

The American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST) is the global leader in advancing best patient outcomes through innovative chest medicine education, clinical research, and team-based care.

Challenge

Dr. Neb is a Scenarios (a story driven simulation) game created for CHEST, the American College for Chest Physicians, to help clinicians who treat patients with uncontrolled COPD. One of the goals in building this game was to change the stigma of the drug, Nebulized LAMA, so that Pulmonologists understand it is a good solution to prescribe for many patients, not just ones at high risk. The goal was to create best practices in having conversations with patients about the drug.

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Strategy & Solution

This Dr. Neb Scenarios game showcases a series of virtual conversations between doctors and patients, laid out with a storybook narrative much like a comic book with voice bubbles. The game walks through a set of interactions with different patients and experiences with doctors asking patients a number of questions, listening to their responses, and then making recommendations based on what they hear.

During each of the 4 scenarios, players are tasked with selecting choices that address the needs of the patient. Points are awarded based on their responses as they are sent down different branching paths. Players must navigate conversations and identify the best response. The game includes a tug-of-war meter which moves left to “unsatisfactory” or right to“satisfactory” depending on the players responses. This indicates to the player their progress throughout the experience. There is also a “history” button that allows players to go back and review their answers and see how they should have responded to follow the correct path forward.

This Scenarios game was built using The Training Arcade®, an authoring tool with a library of games designed for training and education. Creators can add images, animations, live action video, and audio. In this case, CHEST chose to use an animated style to appeal to their audience. CHEST engaged some of their member physicians to define the script and worked with our illustrators to animate each scene.

Christina Lorenzo, Senior Instructional Designer at CHEST, explains why games work for her community in a webinar we did with The Training Magazine, “CHEST learners have complex patients with lots of electronic charts to study and they often work long hours and are frequently on call. They are high performers but have a short attention span and not much time for learning.” Christina creates micro games with The Training Arcade that can be deployed on mobile or tablets so that these busy doctors can learn on the go. “Game-based training,” she says, “is not only fun, it also provides an escape from reality and a chance to practice in a safe place, to fail and to learn. Physicians like these games because they are ‘bite-sized’ and they really enjoy the competitive aspect of the gameplay.”

The game lives on CHEST’s eLearning portal and can be accessed by all of their member pulmonologists. It is also being used at CHEST events throughout the year.