Designing a Serious Game for General Practice Management

This work presents RIDEVA, a three-phase framework for designing serious games in general practice management education, motivated by widespread dissatisfaction among Dutch GP students and alumni with textbook-driven learning of practice management. The authors argue that existing serious game frameworks and healthcare managerial games are not holistic or concrete enough to guide design, and they position RIDEVA as an integrated approach moving from requirements identification through game design to evaluation. The framework is applied to a game grounded in flow theory, player typologies, and a dramatic arc, with eight intended learning outcomes derived from Dutch and international curricula, literature, and expert interviews, aligned with the Netherlands' three-segment GP funding model.

The game's design implements these outcomes through four progressively complex mini-games in which players manage actions, staffing, and resources, receiving algorithmic feedback based on five key performance indicators. Evaluation relied on focus groups and four expert interviews conducted with the DECIDE framework, focused on the Dutch context. Experts rated the learning outcomes positively but emphasized that devising and executing a strategy against a player-defined plan should be the central outcome. They recommended offering both green-field and brown-field starting scenarios, increasing KPI-related realism, and treating patient satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and financial health as the most critical indicators.

The findings are preliminary and explicitly limited. The authors acknowledge that the framework itself is unvalidated, that the target audience of young GPs was not directly involved in evaluation, that translation may have introduced errors, and that engagement and learning effectiveness remain unmeasured. The design is therefore best understood as a well-grounded prototype and a proposed methodology, with empirical assessment of learning outcomes left to future work.