How healthcare providers can use LMS gamification to prove knowledge retention

Ensuring healthcare professionals have the right skills and knowledge is essential for protecting patients’ welfare. But being able to prove knowledge retention is equally important for a few different reasons. They include:

• ✅ Providing evidence of staff knowledge retention for auditing purposes
• ✅ Offering peace of mind to senior leaders and other stakeholders
• ✅ Disproving organisation-wide blindspots or failings when things go wrong

With all of that in mind, gamification is a key tool for healthcare providers who want to document knowledge retention among their workforce.

✳️ Large workforce

Healthcare providers typically need to engage a large number of employees in workplace learning. Gamification is a relatively low-cost, organisation-wide way of getting people invested in L&D.

✳️ Specialist knowledge in niche areas

Many healthcare professions require very detailed knowledge of specific topics. Gamification can be used to spur engagement and ongoing development between peers working in the same specialism.

✳️ High-risk environments

Knowledge retention can’t be reduced to a tick-box exercise when patient safety is at stake. The competitive nature of gamification encourages staff to engage closely with topics that have serious, real-world consequences.

Healthcare lends itself to scenario-based games since so much of healthcare is based on decision-making when faced with a specific scenario. It is relatively easy to replicate protocol-based decisions, branching diagnostic decisions and emergency response scenarios in the form of a game.

• ✅ Create a leaderboard
• ✅ Award points for safety and accuracy
• ✅ Weight points by clinical risk
• ✅ Deduct points for unsafe decision

Since healthcare knowledge retention is best proven through application, not memorisation, this form of LMS gamification is incredibly valuable. It exposes healthcare professionals to more opportunities to apply their knowledge. There’s an in-built motivation to make the correct decisions, but no risk to patient safety when they make the wrong decisions.

The results can be used to prove decision accuracy rates, as well as longer-term trends such as error reduction and time taken to reach correct decisions.

Testing knowledge repeatedly through gamified LMS assessments helps to prove knowledge retention.

Test the same healthcare concepts before a refresher course, immediately after the course and a longer period after the course.

• ✅ Create a leaderboard
• ✅ Offer points for improvement, as well as high scores
• ✅ Award badges for subject mastery or consistency
• ✅ Unlock new levels once knowledge retention is proven

Repeated assessment can be used to prove knowledge retention through improved scores over time and long-term trends for individual learners and full cohorts.

Use spaced repetition in the form of micro-games to test knowledge retention over time.

Create daily or weekly challenges – short assessments of 2-5 questions – to test your learners. 

• ✅ Create a leaderboard
• ✅ Use adaptive tests to adjust topics and difficulty based on previous mistakes
• ✅ Develop boss levels or head-to-head battles to increase engagement for high-risk topics
• ✅ Use the microlearning features of platforms like Totara to embed the micro-games in each employee’s daily workflow

Use these micro-games to prove knowledge retention through improved recall and success rates over time.

Give rewards or prizes to top-performing or most-improved employees to further increase engagement with gamified learning.

This could be something with a monetary value, such as a gift voucher, or something that you know matters to your learners, such as first preference for shift patterns or booking time off.