Journal of the American Medical Association (04/20/26) Mohan, Deepika; Chang, Chung-Chou H.; Fischhoff, Baruch; et al.

A randomized clinical trial evaluated whether a low-cost, theory-based “serious game” could improve emergency physicians' adherence to trauma-triage guidelines for older adults. The study enrolled 800 physicians from U.S. non-trauma centers and randomly assigned half to complete tablet-based game training — an initial 2-hour session followed by quarterly 20-minute refreshers — while the other half received usual education. Over the following year, researchers analyzed Medicare claims for 41,073 injured older adults treated by these physicians, including 1,738 with severe injuries, and found that physicians who played the game had a lower proportion of severely injured older adults who were undertriaged (49% vs 57% in the control group), representing a model-adjusted 7-percentage-point improvement. Nearly all physicians in the intervention group completed at least one quarterly training dose, and two-thirds completed all four. The intervention did not meaningfully affect overtriage rates or the composite clinical outcome of 30-day mortality or readmission, but it demonstrated that a scalable, game-based approach can measurably improve guideline-concordant trauma triage in emergency care.

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