Vital Signs: ED by BreakAway Games, Best of Show at Serious Play 2016

Vital Signs: ED puts the player behind the desk of an emergency physician. Patients arrive in exam rooms one after another. For each of them the player opens the case presentation chart, reads the complaint and orders the procedures that fit it, such as tests or treatments. The orders take time to complete, so the player moves on to another patient while results come back.

Interruptions are built into the design. Phone calls, paperwork and other real-life distractions compete with the patients for attention, and a case that is neglected too long can end badly. Each patient is finished with one of four dispositions: admitted for continued care, discharged, transferred to a trauma center or, in the worst case, sent to the morgue.

BreakAway Games, the developer, builds games for education, training and assessment. Its stated client fields are healthcare, education, defense and emergency management, with corporate training, pharma and medical device makers on the client list. On its own case-study page the studio says the game recreates "the stress and confusion of the emergency department".

Over 30 studios, publishers, companies and student groups won gold, silver or bronze honors in the 2016 International Serious Play Awards. Vital Signs was among the gold winners in the healthcare category, and from that field it was singled out for Best of Show. The ceremony belonged to the Serious Play Conference, which ran from July 26 to 28, 2016, at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Doug Whatley, founder and CEO of BreakAway Games, accepted the Best of Show Award from Sue Bohle, executive director of the Serious Games Association and producer of the Serious Play Conference. BreakAway also took silver in healthcare that year for NBCOT Navigator.

BreakAway Games is still active, and its website loads in November 2026. The studio's case-study page for the game is online and carries a 2026 copyright line. A separate site, Vital Signs Games, presents the title as Vital Signs: Emergency Department and invites visitors to play for free on Steam. The same site mentions nine additional content packs on Steam and does not list their prices. Its footer is dated 2020.

The studio's home page also points to a vHealthCare portal for medical and nursing games and names Incident Commander, an emergency response strategy game, so the title sits inside a wider catalog.