NCT03138304

Trial of a Video Game Intervention to Recalibrate Physician Heuristics: A Followup Study

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 142 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Pittsburgh · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: —
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

The objective of this study is to measure the duration of two different types of interventions to change physician decision making in trauma triage: a video game and an educational program.

Detailed description

Treatment at trauma centers improves outcomes for patients with moderate-to-severe injuries. Accordingly, professional organizations, state authorities, and the federal government have endorsed the systematic triage and transfer of these patients to trauma centers either directly from the field or after evaluation at a non-trauma center. Nonetheless, between 30 to 40% of patients with moderate-to-severe injuries still only receive treatment at non-trauma centers, so-called under-triage. Most of this under-triage occurs because of physician decisions (rather than first-responder decisions). Existing efforts to change physician decision making focus primarily on knowledge of clinical practice guidelines and attitudes towards the guidelines. These strategies ignores the growing consensus that decision making reflects both knowledge as well as intuitive judgments (heuristics). Heuristics, mental short cuts based on pattern recognition, drive the majority of decision making. The investigators developed an adventure video game (Night Shift) to serve as a novel method of recalibrating physician heuristics in trauma triage and compared its efficacy with a standard educational program. This study is designed to measure the degradation of the treatment effect.

Conditions

• Wounds and Injuries

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Video game	Night Shift is an adventure video game with the transformational goal of teaching physicians key characteristics of patients with non-representative severe injuries - injuries classified by the American College of Surgeons as life-threatening or critical but that do not fit the archetype of injuries typically requiring treatment at a trauma center.
BEHAVIORAL	Educational program	Two commercially available applications designed to teach physicians the trauma triage guidelines disseminated by the American College of Surgeons.

Timeline

• Start date: 2017-05-02
• Primary completion: 2017-06-01
• Completion: 2017-06-01
• First posted: 2017-05-03
• Last updated: 2017-08-24

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States