Meet Baptiste Roux and Fast4

March 22, 2021

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ReguliFinally, I suggest you go and meet an actor or‘a digital health innovation in France. Todayhui let’s meet Baptiste Roux and FAST4.

Hello Baptiste, can you introduce yourself briraising ?

Hello Rémy, thank you for having me. I am a pharmacist, a former intern and above all an entrepreneur. I founded the company Fast4, then the games platform Medgame.

You are the founder and CEO of Fast4 / Medgame. Can you present this start up and its solutions to us?

I created the company FAST4 during my internship. It was initially an atypical clinical research organization (Contract Research Organization) based on simulation. Our job is to study the follow-up of recommendations by all health professionals and to understand the levers and obstacles to this follow-up in order to improve adherence. We have developed mobile games to facilitate data collection from practitioners. Spontaneously, this evaluation activity through play led us to subsequently develop its complementary aspect: training.

Gamification is taking an increasing place in the healthcare world, particularly in the training of healthcare professionals. To support the initial training of health professionals, you have developed Medgame. Can you tell us about this solution?

We wanted to approach the evaluation of practices and training from a different perspective. Review new levers. The game seemed like a good opportunity to us. But 3D technologies being far too time-consuming, we took the opposite of the 3D traditionally used to replace it with the gamified chatbot. An immersive, inexpensive “low-technology”, accessible to all and perfectly adapted to the mobile since it comes down to a text message between the player and a virtual patient.

For training, our second asset was to position ourselves on micro-learning, that is to say learning over very short periods of a few minutes. This allows the player to train while waiting for his bus, between two patients… as soon as he has a few free moments. The principle of our games is quite simple: you discuss with a fictitious patient, you ask him questions in order to make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. If you follow the official management recommendations, your patient is cured, if you are wrong, the patient’s condition worsens, and you repeat the game until you find the correct medical management. These training games can be intended for all healthcare professionals, but also for patients.

More recently, we initiated the implementation of a training game platform for medical students: Medgame. Although still embryonic, this platform independent of the industry and in partnership with medical colleges, will host 100,000 games for the start of the student year in September 2021. Our goal: quantity, quality and fun. The goal is not the game, but the training. We are looking for the perfect balance between these two aspects.

The game remains a lever whose objective is to allow the best possible training. It is an exciting project that brings together medical colleges, student associations and a team of highly motivated medical interns. In the same logic of fun training, we hijacked Instagram to make it a training game for medical students (@medgame_insta).

In today’s world, mobile is at the heart of the issues. In particular, we can see the emergence of mobile health games for patients or healthcare professionals. How do you see the future of mobile games applied to the world of health? What are the advantages ?

I think that the serious game in health has a very bright future but a crippling past. The first serious games appeared almost a decade ago, technologically immature and far too early in the healthcare community, which at the time was not yet ready to integrate them. Games with exorbitant costs and very limited utility have led industrial developers to turn away from this fascinating solution.

The same goes for the overexploitation of a 3D technology which, if in cinema it can achieve almost real quality, does not have the means to make such claims in health training. I think the first mistake was to think that 3D was the only solution to create serious games. It has advantages such as immersion, but also drawbacks such as its poor playability on mobile and its enormous development cost. The second mistake was, again in my opinion, to believe that using only playful visual references from the imagination of the game in a medical training would make games.

The heart of the game are the rules, the mechanics, the storyline, and not just the appearance. 3D is a simple simulation technology just like the chatbot, it is the rules instilled by the gamedesigner that make it a game. There are many technologies to use to develop serious games in health. It’s simple, you just have to tap into the traditional game environment, which is infinitely more advanced than the still very young health sector. This is what we did with Fast4 and Medgame. There are so many possibilities for development and evolution for serious healthy gaming. It is exciting. 

As a player in e-health in France, how do you see the post-health crisis and the impact on digital health?

The digital transition started in earnest only a few years ago in healthcare. The health crisis we are going through, as terrible as it is, has undeniably boosted this transition. We will not go back. The crisis is too inscribed in time and in our habits. Fortunately, we will resume face-to-face, necessary and complementary activities, and the presence of digital will become less omnipresent than at present, but a large number of achievements will remain.

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