Playing The Odds - What Healthcare Professionals Can Learn From Poker

To most people, poker is a card game played in smoke-filled rooms like in the movies. However, to me it's more than looking cool in sunglasses; it’s helped me gain a greater perspective on human behaviour.

This is just me looking cool by the Poker table if you ever curious

Every poker player from amateur to pro, has experienced ‘being on tilts;’ it’s a common term tossed around in poker. To be on tilts is to make a play even though you know it’s a bad strategy because your emotions are interfering with your ability to think clearly.

 

Poker is a game of incomplete information—you’re not sure of your cards’ strength and you’re not sure how your opponents will react to the ever-changing nuances of the community cards. A player who understands their hand and carefully plans their strategy rather than acting on emotion is more likely to win.

 

As a behavioural science consultant, I spend a lot of my time thinking about cognitive biases in healthcare. I can’t help but see the similarities in the way a poker player makes sub-optimal decisions and the way that patients and doctors do too.

 

A common bias that I see across both poker and healthcare is Optimism Bias or what we call in poker - playing the odds. This is the mistaken belief that one’s chances of experiencing a negative event are lower than one’s peers.

 

In healthcare, we see numerous patients ‘playing the odds’ with their health. This can be part of a broad range of sub-optimal decision-making by patients. Behaviours as diverse as seeking ‘quack’ solutions, being non-adherent, listening to non-credible voices online, and settling for a less optimal treatment choice can all be linked to optimism bias.

 

For example, studies consistently demonstrate that smokers believe the health risks of smoking are lower for themselves than for other smokers. Furthermore, smokers significantly downplay the dangers of second-hand smoke in comparison to non-smokers (Hill, 2012).

 

Doctors aren’t immune to optimism bias either. According to studies in Europe, there are significant differences in doctors’ perceptions of medication adherence amongst their own patients compared to patients in general (Clyne, 2016).

 

Central to the optimism bias challenge is how we can help patients make better appraisals of their health probabilities and then act appropriately.

 

At DeltaMV, we have worked with a range of healthcare organisations on this exact challenge. Even though sharing ‘facts’ (i.e., the data) can be part of the answer, it often requires more than this. Many of our solutions focus on building upon the rational data story to make it a more emotionally engaging one. There are a range of ways to do this such as;

  • Bring the data to life with real stories and examples that patients can relate to—an anecdote can often be more compelling than data.

  • Contextualise data using sub-samples that a patient can more readily identify with. For example, focussing on a patient group of similar age and gender, community, or even their local geography.

  • Make a health behaviour/ treatment seem popular amongst their peer group through talking about how many other people just like them are doing it.

  • Share a treatment plan upon diagnosis that gets patients to commit to pre-agreed trigger points (such as moving to another line of treatment) when certain clinical targets are not met.

  • Tap into AI’s ever changing and tempting range of options to model different future scenarios based on current action/ inaction that really brings the risks/ outcomes to life in an emotionally engaging way.

 

For more information on patient adherence, listen to the latest DeltaMV Insight Bites episode “Behavioural Science to drive better patient adherence. —> LINK <—  

 

REFERENCES:

  • Hill, K. (n.d.). Dangerous Optimism: Risk, Bias and Smoking. [online] Scientific American Blog Network. Available at: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/dangerous-optimism-risk-bias-and-smoking/.

  • Clyne, W., McLachlan, S., Mshelia, C., Jones, P., De Geest, S., Ruppar, T., Siebens, K., Dobbels, F. and Kardas, P. (2016). ‘My patients are better than yours’: optimistic bias about patients’ medication adherence by European health care professionals. Patient Preference and Adherence, Volume 10, pp.1937–1944. doi: https://doi.org/10.2147/ppa.s108827.

Andrew DeLeeuw