Corporate wargaming and other techniques for testing e-health solutions in Chile

Abstract

As in many other OECD countries, the combination of longer life expectancies and the growth of senior populations in Chile is putting its healthcare provision under considerable stress. The lack of a preventive focus means the system intervenes mostly to repair the deterioration of the body. With a growing number of ageing citizens accumulating, this is simply too expensive. To counteract this trend, we devised and tested an online communication prototype to foster health prevention and self-management among senior populations in Chile called Bienestando, based on an automated call centre and a specialized website able to track individual users. Bienestando took advantage of the country's relatively high levels of internet penetration and its prevalence as a source for health information among the target group. Rather than focusing on the prototype and its effects, this article describes a procedure to foresee the likely performance of a strategy to massify Bienestando. The procedure combined a multi-stakeholder health communication approach with competitive intelligence techniques, notably a rare combination of corporate wargaming and scenario analysis. These two forward-looking techniques are normally used in business strategic planning; here they were used to devise plausible ways to massify the outcome of our research. This perspective is consistent with principles of implementation science, aimed to facilitate the adoption of scientific knowledge as a solution to specific problems -in this case, fostering health prevention around the ageing process in Chile.