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Gamification is the application of typical elements of game playing to other areas of activity in order to encourage people to interact with a product, service or experience.
In a healthcare context, this means introducing interactive elements into the patient experience to make information easier to understand, actions easier to complete and progress more visible.
Examples of gamification in healthcare include:
The objective is not simply to entertain patients.
Effective healthcare gamification connects an action with motivation. Over time, these mechanics can encourage people to continue interacting with a healthcare service and potentially support behavioural change. This principle was central to the original Adore Digital gamification concept.
One of the biggest challenges in healthcare marketing and patient communication is keeping people engaged.
Patients may need to understand complex information, compare different treatment options, prepare for procedures, attend appointments or follow a treatment plan over an extended period.
Simply presenting more information does not necessarily solve the problem.
Gamification provides a different approach: turn passive information into an interactive experience.
A well-designed gamification strategy can support three particularly important areas.
Gamification gives users a reason to continue interacting with a digital healthcare experience.
Progress, goals, feedback, achievements and other mechanics can provide additional motivation to return to an app or website and complete specific actions.
Modern research supports the relevance of this approach. A systematic review of healthcare management literature identifies behaviour, psychology, technology and gamification elements among the core dimensions of healthcare gamification.
The important point is that gamification should be connected to a meaningful patient objective rather than simply adding points or badges.
Healthcare decisions often require patients to process information they have never encountered before.
Gamification can make this educational process more interactive.
Instead of presenting a visitor with a long page explaining several treatments, for example, a clinic could guide them through a short questionnaire about their needs and then present information relevant to their answers.
This was one of the main benefits identified in Adore Digital's original gamification framework: helping users navigate a wide range of options and identify solutions that may be relevant to their needs.
Gamified experiences can also help healthcare organisations understand their audiences.
For example, an educational questionnaire can collect information voluntarily provided by a visitor and use their answers to personalise the next stage of communication.
Instead of every visitor receiving exactly the same experience, their answers can help determine which educational content, services or follow-up communication is most relevant.
This makes gamification useful not only as an engagement tool but also as part of a broader healthcare marketing and patient communication strategy.
Important: Any collection and use of personal or health-related information needs to be designed around the applicable privacy, consent and healthcare regulatory requirements.
Gamification does not necessarily require developing a complex healthcare app.
Some of the most useful applications can be relatively simple.
An interactive quiz can test knowledge, challenge misconceptions and provide the correct information after each response.
For clinics, this creates an opportunity to transform frequently asked questions into an experience patients actively participate in rather than simply read.
A patient match quiz guides a website visitor through a series of questions and provides relevant information or recommendations based on their answers.
The original Adore Digital concept used a simple journey:
Website visit → personalised questionnaire → contact/consent step → personalised follow-up.
From a marketing perspective, this can turn an ordinary clinic website visit into an interactive patient journey.
Gamification can also be used after conversion.
A patient calendar can incorporate appointment reminders, scheduling and progress-related interactions to encourage patients to remain engaged with their treatment journey.
The original Adore Digital concept proposed using such calendars for existing patients to support doctor-visit reminders and treatment-plan engagement.
Showing progress toward a goal can make an otherwise invisible process tangible.
This is particularly relevant for longer healthcare journeys where users need to repeat actions over time.
Research into health apps has found feedback and monitoring, goals and planning, and rewards among commonly used behaviour-change techniques in gamified health applications.
Fertility treatment is a particularly interesting example of how gamification can be applied to healthcare marketing and patient education.
Potential patients and donors may arrive at an IVF clinic website with questions, misconceptions or uncertainty about treatment.
Instead of expecting them to find answers across multiple pages, a clinic can create an educational fertility quiz.
The purpose is not to gamify the medical treatment itself.
The quiz can instead help the visitor understand the process, address common myths and direct them toward information relevant to their situation.
The original Adore Digital IVF concept identified patient and donor scepticism and misconceptions about treatment as one of the problems such an experience could address. The proposed quiz would combine myth-busting questions with factual follow-up information about the relevant procedures.
A simplified IVF clinic journey could therefore look like this:
This creates a much more interactive journey than simply sending every website visitor to the same treatment page.
Personalisation is one of the areas where gamification and healthcare marketing naturally intersect.
Every meaningful answer given during an interactive assessment can potentially help determine what information the person should see next.
For example, two visitors may arrive on the same clinic landing page but have completely different needs.
A gamified questionnaire allows the experience to branch according to those needs.
The original Adore Digital concept proposed an educational quiz designed both to raise awareness and collect voluntarily provided data points for subsequent personalised communication.
This turns gamification into more than an engagement tactic.
It becomes part of the patient journey:
Engage → Learn → Understand the patient → Personalise → Follow up.
A gamification strategy that works in one market may not work exactly the same way in another.
Language is only one part of localisation.
Different audiences may respond differently to competition, achievement, rewards, social interaction or particular types of messaging.
The original Adore Digital framework therefore highlighted the importance of adapting gamification mechanics to individual markets and considering both the audience's native language and local culture.
For international healthcare providers, this is particularly important.
An IVF clinic targeting patients from several European countries, for example, should not assume that translating the same quiz into five languages automatically creates five equally effective patient experiences.
Healthcare gamification should be localised, not merely translated.
The evidence is promising, but healthcare organisations should avoid assuming that adding game mechanics automatically improves results.
A systematic review of health and wellbeing interventions found predominantly positive effects, particularly for behavioural outcomes, while a substantial share of studies produced mixed or neutral results.
More recent healthcare-management research similarly connects gamification with areas such as healthy-behaviour encouragement, compliance, responsibility, preventive medicine and chronic disease management.
The implication for healthcare marketers is important:
Gamification is not effective simply because something looks like a game.
The mechanics need to match the patient's motivation, the healthcare context and the action the organisation wants to encourage.
Successful gamification starts with the objective, not with points, badges or rewards.
Before introducing gamification, healthcare organisations should ask:
A quiz with no meaningful result is simply a quiz.
A questionnaire that educates the patient, helps them understand their options and creates a relevant next step can become part of a much broader digital healthcare experience.
For healthcare providers, gamification works best when it is integrated into the wider marketing ecosystem. For example:
This approach connects engagement, education, personalisation and conversion instead of treating gamification as an isolated website feature.
For IVF clinics, private clinics and other healthcare providers with complex patient journeys, that can be particularly valuable.
At Adore Digital, we look at gamification as part of the wider digital patient journey, not as a standalone marketing trick.
The starting point is understanding what the patient needs to know, what prevents them from taking the next step and where interactive experiences can make that journey clearer.
Depending on the healthcare provider, this could include:
The original Adore Digital framework combined gamified patient-match surveys with personalised email communication, patient calendars, content planning, segmentation and ongoing reporting.
The goal is not to make healthcare feel like a game.
The goal is to use interaction, motivation and personalisation to make digital healthcare experiences easier to understand and more engaging for patients.
Gamification in healthcare is the use of game-like mechanics and interactive elements in non-game healthcare contexts to encourage patient engagement, education, motivation or behaviour change.
Examples include educational quizzes, health challenges, progress tracking, patient-match questionnaires, achievement systems, medication or appointment reminders and interactive treatment journeys.
Gamification can transform passive healthcare information into an interactive experience by giving users goals, feedback, progress indicators and personalised next steps. Evidence suggests it can positively affect health-related behaviours, although outcomes depend on the context and design.
Yes. Clinics can use gamification before and after an appointment. Examples include symptom or treatment questionnaires, educational quizzes, personalised patient journeys, appointment reminders and ongoing engagement tools.
IVF and fertility clinics can use interactive quizzes to address misconceptions, educate potential patients or donors, guide visitors toward relevant information and create personalised follow-up journeys.
No. A healthcare organisation does not need to build a game. Gamification means applying selected game mechanics to a non-game healthcare context.
