Serious gaming in internal medicine education: Do we know best or do we know last?

Abstract

The use of digital tools is indispensable in our daily lives. The medical world keeps up with this progress by implementing digital tools to facilitate and improve patient care, such as eConsults and self-care apps. Serious games are also becoming increasingly popular in healthcare education, particularly in surgical residency training and nursing education. However, gaming and digitisation of education have not been widely integrated in internal medicine residency education yet. Therefore, these programs are not yet modernised to meet the demands of the 21th century physician. In this article, we will explicate our view on digitisation of the internal medical education programme with special attention to serious gaming. We will discuss pros and cons of digitisation, describe challenges of development and implementation of games, and offer some examples of digital educational tools for practical use.