‘Serious’ Video Games May Improve Physician Decision Making in Trauma Triage Situations

An emergency medicine physician working in the field or at a non-trauma center often has minutes to assess a patient’s injuries and decide whether they are severe enough to warrant transfer to a Level I or II trauma center. Under these circumstances—and often with only incomplete or suboptimal information available—emergency physicians rely heavily on their judgment of how closely a patient’s injuries mirror or represent the typical case that would require transfer to a trauma center. In order to help improve this type of physician decision making, known as heuristics, Dartmouth Institute Professor Amber Barnato, MD, recently worked with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University to develop and test two “serious” video game training interventions designed to improve judgment.