What if healthcare compliance was a video game?

I miss the good old days of gaming. Before games were developed mostly to wring money out of you with microtransactions. 

Back when they used to just be unfair. Or if not unfair, so insanely difficult they were all but impossible to win.

Why? Because at least back then, games were honest. 

You had to put in quarters at the arcade to keep playing, so we knew the games were designed to make you lose. More losing, more quarters.

Yeah, you could ‘win,’ but winning wasn’t the point. You knew that games like Mortal Kombat II were reading your inputs to block your punches and kicks. But playing was still fun, even if you couldn’t win.

Fast forward a few decades and I work in healthcare, building AI to help make QA and compliance more bearable (it typically requires hours of dull, repetitive manual work that can make even the most bright-eyed healthcare professionals burn out). You have to spot violations with limited time and energy, and the consequences can be dire if even a few slip through. 

It’s not even fair, Most healthcare organizations, if they do any QA at all (we at Verbal found that nearly 20% have no QA program in place), only QA a fraction of visits and interactions. That means a huge percentage of violations won’t ever even cross your desk. You won’t even have a chance to spot them.

The longer I spend in the space, the more unreasonable it seems. But unlike us kids with those old arcade games, many healthcare leaders still think the ‘game’ is winnable. They don’t see just how rigged against their team it really is.

Eventually it got me thinking: What would the healthcare compliance game look like? 

Here’s my best shot. 

Welcome to QAPI: The Manual Healthcare Compliance Simulator. The tagline: No winning, only survival…

The setup & mechanics

You play as QAPI, the compliance gremlin, forever cursed to manually audit patient visits and documentation. You weren't always like this—years of manual QA did this to you. But now you're trapped in an endless cycle of chart reviews, violation hunts, and the constant fear of missed citations.

The world around you is a dystopian healthcare facility where paper notes tower like skyscrapers, EHR windows multiply faster than you can close them, and somewhere in the distance, you can hear the ominous ticking of audit deadlines. Chart notes, transcripts, and EHR windows are piling up faster than you can process them. And the clock? It never stops ticking.

Your character sits at a desk buried under an avalanche of documentation—sticky notes cascading like confetti, computer screens cluttered with telehealth call recordings, medication lists, and AI summaries that may or may not be accurate. Coffee rings stain everything. The fluorescent lights flicker ominously overhead.

Your mission: Flag every violation, discrepancy, and AI hallucination. You are the last line of defense against regulatory disaster.

The challenge: There's a fast-ticking timer, limited energy, and an ever-present burnout meter that inches toward critical levels with every passing hour.

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Burnout Meter

The most innovative (and cruel) feature in QAPI is the Burnout Meter. Unlike traditional health bars that regenerate over time, the Burnout Meter only moves in one direction: up.

Face burnout as dull, repetitive manual work drains your time and energy. Every chart you review, every violation you flag, every AI summary you fact-check—it all feeds the meter. Spend hours auditing charts and entering data, and watch as your character's movements become sluggish, their vision blurs, and their ability to catch violations diminishes.

The only way to slow the meter's relentless climb? Brief coffee breaks and bathroom visits. But even these provide minimal relief. Take too many breaks, and you'll fall behind on your quotas. Don't take enough, and you'll miss critical violations as your concentration fades.

There is no winning strategy. The meter always reaches maximum eventually.

Countdown 

In the upper right corner of your screen, a timer counts down with ruthless precision. 6 DAYS UNTIL AUDIT. The numbers glow red as they tick away, casting an ominous light over your workspace.

As the timer approaches zero, the game mechanics become increasingly punishing:

• New violations spawn at double speed
• Random chart anomalies appear without warning
• Your coffee breaks become shorter and less effective
• The Burnout Meter accelerates

Some violations never cross your desk until the final 24 hours, when they appear in overwhelming clusters. These "audit eve specials" are designed to test whether you'll crack under pressure or somehow maintain your sanity while processing 47 urgent chart reviews at 2 AM.

Violations Tracker

Perhaps the most psychologically damaging element in QAPI is the Violations Missed counter in the bottom left corner. This running tally of your failures follows you throughout the game, growing larger and more prominent as your mistakes accumulate.

Miss a medication error buried in page 23 of a discharge summary? The counter ticks up. Overlook an undocumented phone call in a 47-page chart? Another tick. Fail to catch an AI-generated note that confidently states a patient's broken leg was treated with antidepressants? The counter doesn't just tick—it flashes angrily.

The cruelest twist: The game never tells you what you missed or when you missed it. You only discover your failures during the final audit sequence, when each missed violation is revealed in excruciating detail, complete with the potential consequences you narrowly avoided (or didn't).

Randomized violations

This is perhaps the “most unfair” game mechanic. Even if you show superhuman levels of insight, spotting every violation that crosses your desk, there’s still a good chance – practically a guarantee – you’ll miss some.

That’s because, as in real life, you only get to audit a fraction of interactions and documentations in QAPI. The vast majority never even cross your desk. Meaning, you never even have a chance to catch violations.

QAPI's violation generator ensures no two playthroughs are the same. Violations appear at random intervals, disguised within seemingly routine documentation. One moment you're reviewing a standard follow-up visit, the next you're deciphering whether a physician's voice-to-text transcription that reads "patient has chronic pain in left foot" was supposed to say "chronic pain in left foot" or "chronic pain, left foot"—and yes, the difference matters for billing compliance.

The game's AI generates increasingly creative violations:

• Medication dosages that are technically correct but suspiciously specific ("Take 1.7234 tablets twice daily")
• Progress notes that describe procedures that haven't been invented yet
• Patient addresses that lead to bodies of water
• Appointment times scheduled for February 30th

Battle terrifying bosses like The Regulator and Big Law. The Regulator appears without warning, demanding immediate explanations for documentation from three months ago. Big Law emerges when violation patterns suggest larger systemic issues, transforming individual chart reviews into facility-wide investigations.

Or unlock EASY mode and get the upper hand with Verbal's AI QA power-ups that automatically flag potential violations, verify AI-generated content, and provide real-time compliance scoring.

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The reality behind the game

While QAPI: The Healthcare Compliance Simulator might be fictional, the pain points it represents are devastatingly real. Healthcare professionals spend countless hours manually reviewing patient interactions, documentation, and AI-generated content, often working under impossible deadlines with limited resources.

The "game" mechanics—burnout, time pressure, missed violations, and random crises—mirror the daily reality of compliance teams across the healthcare industry. The difference is that in real healthcare, the stakes aren't game over screens and restart buttons. They're patient safety, regulatory penalties, and the professional reputation of entire organizations.

But here's the good news: unlike our fictional nightmare game, the real world of healthcare compliance doesn't have to be played on impossible difficulty.

Switching to Easy Mode?

The healthcare industry has spent decades playing compliance on the hardest possible difficulty setting. Manual processes, overwhelming documentation requirements, and the challenge of verifying AI-generated content have created a perfect storm of inefficiency and burnout.

But what if you could change the difficulty setting?

Verbal transforms healthcare compliance from a survival horror game into a strategic management simulation. Our AI doesn't replace human expertise—it amplifies it, handling routine tasks so your team can focus on complex cases that require human judgment.

Ready to make the switch?

Don't keep playing on NIGHTMARE. The game isn't fair, and you don't have to keep suffering through it.

Turn on easy mode and be your success to care quality, not luck.

Book some time for a demo at www.tryverbal.com/demo if you're ready to make the switch!