Video game could improve emergency doctors’ trauma decisions

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By Olivia Bowthorpe

Training on a specialist video game has been shown to improve doctors' decisions when triaging severely injured older patients in emergency departments.

The study, led by Dr Deepika Mohan, emergency medicine physician at the University of Pittsburgh, US, tested whether short, “serious” game training sessions could improve adherence to trauma guidelines.

They recruited 800 emergency physicians working in hospitals that were not major trauma centres, the equivalent of UK district general hospitals or trauma units, where injured patients are often first assessed.

Decisions made for more than 41,000 injured patients aged 65 and over were followed over the subsequent year in the randomised clinical trial.

Doctors assigned to the training had a lower proportion of severely injured older adults who were undertriaged (49%) compared with the comparison group (57%).

'Novel approach'

Researchers in JAMA add that this "suggests a novel approach to improve adherence to clinical guidelines".

Mohan told Doctors.net.uk: "Too often, the default response when encountering issues with medical decision-making is to think about ways to bypass the physician: decision support tools (now AI-based), expert teams, ’nudges’ (choice architecture).