Doug Goldstein, eFuturist, and CEO of iConecto-Gaming4Health took a few minutes to talk to Disruptive Women’s Wendy Grossman about the eHealthcare trends of the future.

Q: What does it mean to be an eFuturist?

A: I focus on how emerging technology and entertainment can be used to improve our lives.

Q: So, how is online technology transforming women’s healthcare?

A: There’s this broad category called “experiential media,” which could include mobile and wireless or video games or virtual worlds. It’s basically the automation of processes that typically took more time before.

So, the potential to change women’s healthcare is substantial in terms of expanding access and improving convenience. The rate of change that happens really depends on what happens with reimbursement reform. Because right now, reimbursement to physicians depends on a physical location to be associate with the services.

It’s sort of like saying, ‘In order to buy an airline ticket, you have to go to the airport.” We can buy airline tickets online now, we used to do it through travel agents, we didn’t have to go to a physical location to buy that ticket.

Healthcare is clearly more complex than buying an airline ticket. But in context of a doctor-patient relationship and continuity of care, there are many many interactions that could be mediated more conveniently, effectively and affordabley through electronic media. But right now, there is no reimbursement model or incentives for physicians to support that — unless they’re in a system like Kaiser. Kaiser has documented that they’ve been able to improve the quality of care for not just women — but men also — by reducing costs and reducing office visits 25 percent. But improving convenience, patient satisfaction and maintaining and enhancing the quality of care.

Q: Are you talking about e-mailing with your doctor? Or what are you talking about?

A: Yeah, it could involve instant messaging, it could be e-mailing, it could be automating processes in an online environment or community.

Q: Yeah, they can’t bill for that now.

A: No. Unless you’re with an integrated system like Kaiser.

Q: Okay. I read that you look at entertainment trends that are revolutionizing the health industry? What does that mean?

A: There’s this whole industry called disease and demand management. Healthplans try to get people who are healthy to stay healthy. Or people who are at risk, to reduce risk. Many times, these programs are what people should do. These programs really don’t leverage what people want to do, what feels good, or really take lessons from industries that influence behavior like the entertainment industry. Health doesn’t have to be work — just like school doesn’t have to be work.

I really try to focus on how to make health a want-to not a should, through things like health and entertainment. Video games are an example. So is the virtual world. There’s ways to engage people through a median, while also delivering a message.

There’s a video game called Remission for teens with cancer. If you have a teen with cancer, would you rather make them read something about their condition and then tell them they have to go to their chemotherapy? Or would you rather them immerse in a video game where they kill cancer cells and in that process, learn what’s going on with their condition in an entertaining and engaging formant? That format has been proved to enhance compliance and patient empowerment.

Using popular entertainment approaches with purpose, is, I think, a wave of the future with health and education for women, men, children of all ages.

Q: I read you’ve got a database of nearly 600 egames. But can you tell me what gaming4health is?

A: There’s more than 500 games. They range from Remission to Wii Fit. But there’s four, broad citizen-facing categories: The first is exergaming — like Wii Sport, Wii Fit or Outdoor Challenge. Then, there’s a category called brain fitness, games and activities from companies like Happy Neuron. We know the brain has neuroplasticity at any age and you can improve brain function through targeted activities focused on memory, attention, visual, spatial, language — through as little as 15 minutes a day.

The two other categories are condition management, so remission is an example of that. And, then healthy eating.

Many many of the challenges we have in women’s health are related to two basic things. The first one, being the most important, is that we just don’t move enough — whether it’s dance, exercise or walking. Any form of movement are dropping off leading to the rise of obesity across all ages, genders, etc.. And the other piece is just getting smarter about food intake. The amount of food that American’s consume is steadily increasing and that directly correlates with the BMI factor. Our body mass up index.

Q: Right. So do you think the Wii is just as good as going to the gym?

A: Well, the answer is — perhaps. Going to the gym doesn’t mean that you’ve actually got a good work out. Just because I wear a pedometer doesn’t mean I’m walking more. What you do with the gym or what you do with these various exergames are totally up to you. So the answer is: absolutely they can be. You spend 60 minutes at the gym doing vigorous exercise increasing your heart rate, you can do something very similar with the Wii Fit in the comfort of your own home.

Q: Anything else you think is important for disruptive women’s readers to know about ehealth and egaming?

A: In many cases, women are the healthcare decision maker — or the healthcare CFO –managing not only their health but the health of their husbands, their significant others, their kids, their friends. And the power of these diverse ways of being healthy fit in quite well to that role.

Also, there’s a category of gaming called casual gaming. And women have traditionally been the heaviest users of casual games. (Which are an online game or a video game you can play in less than 20 minutes). it relieves stress. In essence, many healthy games relieve stress, or fall into the casual gaming category.

It’s something that fits into the lifestyle for many women and gives them added tools to help improve the health of their family.

Video games, as an example, are just tools. Just like hammers are tools. Hammers can be used to build houses or they can used for breaking and entering.

We can guide our friends in using tools that are smart — video games that have a purpose or are smart. There’s a whole series of video games coming out by National Geographic, and video games that have a health benefit — and we should put those in a different category than a video game that maybe doesn’t have those benefit.

There’s a book out called, ‘Don’t Bother Me Mom, I’m Learning.’ Even video games without explicit environmental or health benefits do help develop valuable skills from strategy, to collaboration to running teams. There’s a whole set of learning that happens in the virtual environment. They’re just not time wasters. The message is, before we apply stereotypes to the whole video gaming industry: Let’s open our eyes and look at how they can help us solve problems.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 4th, 2009 at 2:28 pm and is filed under HIT/Health Gaming, Man of the Month. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.