The Games We Play The Internet is another place to play doctor

by David Orenstein free-lance writer

Here’s a strange idea: You might have time to kill. Here’s an even stranger idea: You might want to fill that free time with leisure that reminds you of work. Go ahead and play doctor at the online emergency room game, www.ERsim.com.

Produced by Legacy Interactive, the company that makes computer games such as “Emergency Room: Code Red” and “Combat Medic: Special Forces,” ERsim.com offers a cute “diversion” with the promise: “You are the doctor.” Playing the game is free after you undergo a relatively painless registration and perhaps a download of a browser plug-in.

The object of the game is to provide the best care (but no unnecessary care) to each patient wheeled into your corner of a busy emergency room. You must properly examine, diagnose, and treat each patient, and then complete a detailed chart with your diagnosis and hospital orders. Do you send the patient to surgery, intensive care, or elsewhere (or is that St Elsewhere?). Surely, the most diverting part of the game is the simulated paperwork.

You’ll have 15 cases to choose from, covering a surprisingly wide range of emergencies. My wife and I handled three of them: a teen-ager hurt in a car wreck, an Elvis impersonator who had a drug-induced heart attack, and a fashion model who collapsed after adding methamphetamine to her anorexic lifestyle. Although the first case was sad and straightforward, the other two were humorous.

At one point the supermodel promises, “Take good care of me and there is an autographed copy of Vogue in it for you.”
She actually says that, by the way.

Nicely acted voiceovers bring liveliness to the game. The graphics, meanwhile, are typical of the online animation technology called Flash. They’re a prettier version of the flat-colored line-art drawings characteristic of airline safety cards.

After you have selected your case, you see an animation in which the patient incurs his injury. You then see your patient laid out on an ER table with a bank of monitors near his head and a menu down the side of the screen where you can call up the tools of the trade. To correctly treat the patient, you must acquire information from the vital signs monitors, examine the patient with tools ranging from a CT scanner to a stethoscope, and consult a computer that stores diagnosis and treatment protocols (and uploads them to a PDA). From there you must treat the patient and prep him for appropriate post-ER care.

In the case of the accident victim, the monitors revealed that she was having trouble breathing and that the oxygen mask had to be applied quickly. An ultrasound turned up internal bleeding, and X-rays showed fractures along her left side. Treatment included applying a cervical collar, a splint for her left leg, a saline IV to compensate for blood loss, and IV meds. After she was stable enough to move, I had to briskly complete her chart, where I specified her injuries and ordered emergency consults with orthopaedics and general surgery. I even specified transport orders.

Other cases call for other approaches. After you have signed off on each patient, you are given a score, but (now remember this is a diversion) you also get a thorough review by a more senior physician. He tells you what you did right, what you did wrong, and what you should have done, but didn’t. Along the way you rise through hospital hierarchy.

You may regard the game as kitsch within a niche or you may find that it alleviates the jealousy you always have harbored for those ER “heroes” on TV.

David Orenstein is a technology and business writer in Silicon Valley. To learn more about a technology topic in Computing Care, e-mail him at davealli@attbi.com.