What Is Gamification?

It might seem like a loaded phrase, but gamification is actually a simple concept used to engage you daily. Checking your Facebook feed for new updates, using a fitness tracker to log your daily steps, and even rating an Uber driver are all forms of gamification. At its core, the practice of gamification involves extracting the elements of gameplay that people find compelling and using them to drive actions and behaviors in non-game settings.

Gamification can be used to attract and retain customers across multiple disciplines, including the pharmaceutical industry. By using core tactics of gamification in their patient engagement programs, pharmaceutical marketers and brand managers can tap into the psychological aspects of game mechanics to create high-value interactions with patients. And when it comes to addressing the issue of non-adherence, gamification for pharmaceutical brands can be a valuable tool in order to improve patient outcomes and ultimately help the bottom line.

How Can Gamification Be Used to Engage Patients?

Gamification hinges upon hooking users into a digital experience, and when applied to pharma brands, marketers can effectively keep patients engaged and motivated to take their medications as prescribed. Games work by satisfying several human desires, including reward, status, achievement, self-expression, competition, and altruism. The mechanics behind games, from points and levels to challenges and leaderboards, are responsible for addressing these desires. Completing challenging goals, for example, brings a rush of energy and elation that keep players coming back.

This is where an increased amount of dopamine – the chemical at the center of our brain’s pleasure system – comes into play. Dopamine can help drive frequent engagement, which marketers can harness to help educate patients about their condition, their medication, and the benefits of remaining adherent.

How Can Pharmaceutical Companies Benefit from Gamification?

Gamification is a core pillar of the HealthPrize platform, which has been used by half of the world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies to improve adherence by an average of 52% over a drug’s baseline rate. The HealthPrize platform uses gamification to help establish healthy habits from the outset, combined with education to enhance intrinsic motivation so patients are more able to maintain their healthy behaviors in the long term, even once they’re no longer enrolled in a program.

John Ragland, chief product officer at HealthPrize, puts it this way: “We blend in gamification to start to reinforce positive health messages so that we shift the action of taking the medication from something they do to get an external reward into something they want to do internally. The education component of the platform – the surveys, quizzes, and daily tips – is what ultimately drives persistence.”

When just a 10% increase in medication adherence could result in billions of added revenue for pharma, results like HealthPrize’s 52% mean increases in adherence are no small matter and gamification can help get you there.