Serious Games for Healthcare: UW-Madison's Games & Simulation Library
The Games & Simulation for Healthcare portal was a University of Wisconsin-Madison project, begun in fall 2008, that collected serious games and simulations for clinicians, educators and patients in one searchable inventory. Its web address no longer loads in November 2026.
Updated
What the portal was
The Games & Simulation for Healthcare portal, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, started in fall 2008 as an experiment in pulling together scattered resources on games and simulations in healthcare education and practice. It aimed to be a portal and a network for clinicians, researchers and educators who wanted to bring serious games and simulation into their scholarship and patient care. It also welcomed healthcare consumers, advocates and others interested in patient and clinician education and in clinical research that uses game-based or simulation-based learning.
Eric B. Bauman, PhD, RN, led the content, and Allan R. Barclay, MLIS, AHIP, led the web and technical work, both at UW-Madison. Aurel Mihai of the EMSTAT Center at Upstate Medical University served as associate content lead, and several UW-Madison students helped with the project over its first years.
The problem it addressed
The team's case for action rested on seven background observations about healthcare serious games and simulations. Definitions and categories are unclear, and the same thing is used by different audiences in different ways. Technical requirements and environments vary. Such products are not published like books and journals, and what is not published is not indexed or organized. What is not organized is not easily found or evaluated, and what is not found is not used.
The team answered with a flexible inventory offered through the portal. It began by collecting easy-to-find titles under two basic categories, one for clinicians and healthcare providers and one for patients and consumers, and used existing website tools from the Ebling Library for its first mock-ups. Visitors could browse the inventory, search it by vendor, audience, platform or topic, and see the latest additions.
What is true today
The portal's address, healthcaregames.wisc.edu, no longer loads in November 2026, so no current page for the library is available there.
For a current view of healthcare serious games, the games directory on this site lists clinical-medicine and patient-health titles with the date each official page was last checked.
Questions about the portal
Who built the Games & Simulation for Healthcare portal?
A University of Wisconsin-Madison team led by Eric B. Bauman (content) and Allan R. Barclay (web and technical), with Aurel Mihai of Upstate Medical University's EMSTAT Center as associate content lead.
How could visitors search the inventory?
They could browse it, search by vendor, audience, platform or topic, and look at the most recent additions. Titles were sorted for clinicians and providers or for patients and consumers.
Is the portal still online?
Its official page no longer loads as of November 2026.