What is HealthAdvisor?

Welcome to the Health Advisor business! Your firm helps clients successfully navigate the healthcare system. People pay you – actually, they pay an annual fee – for you to help them make the highest-value decisions regarding their health. You are not a doctor, but you have much data and information available to help your clients make the best choices. Your goal is to maximize their health state. Your score is the average health state of your clients divided by the costs of providing these outcomes.

You also need to stay in business! As you are responsible for all of the costs associated with your clients’ health, you need to pay careful attention to the performance and costs of the providers you select for both test and treatments. If you spend more than a client’s annual fee, the excess costs come out of your account. If you spend less than the fee, the excess payment goes into your account. Of course, you could save money by providing minimal treatment, but then your reputation will quickly fade and you would have few if any clients.

Keep in mind that you are providing health advice, but not healthcare. You decide which doctors and other services to employ. For these providers, your clients are patients. For you, they are clients who expect value for their annual payment.

Virtual Therapy for the US Healthcare System
Our world is becoming more complex and interconnected. The technologies that were supposed to make our world simpler are at times the cause of much frustration. The ability to manage our daily lives can be directly affected by our capability to navigate our way through complex environments. One of the most critical of these is the healthcare system. It is clearly complex with many stakeholders operating quasi-independently to serve competing interests and constituencies. Ideas that could be major improvements to the system are not easily implemented and evaluated. But, what if we used technology to our advantage? Created a virtual healthcare system where new products, ideas, concepts and policies can be tried out? We have hopefully created that environment through the online game, Health Advisor.