Walk around Sydney and chances are, you’ll still find plenty of people playing Pokémon GO. Enrico Coiera, director of Macquarie’s Centre for Health Informatics, explains what the global phenomenon can teach us about solving healthcare issues.

If we can believe what we are seeing, Pokémon GO might be the world’s most effective, and most widespread, population weight loss intervention. Over the space of a few weeks, it has prompted millions of children, teens and more than a few adults to get off the couch, turn off Netflix, leave the laptop in their bedroom, and walk out into the world to breathe the fresh air.

Healthcare should pay attention. While healthcare researchers slowly come to grips with ideas like using gamification and social media to defeat obesity, the game industry may well have jumped the queue and done it.

Pokémon GO has proved that people are more than happy to exercise, and to engage with others in the real world, with the right motivation. For younger generations who have grown up in a world that is digitally augmented, the digital-social complex is the way to access their lives. Jogging with a Fitbit is probably compelling for those who already are motivated to exercise. Pokémon GO does something more miraculous. It causes the Lazarus generation to rise up, and to move.

Mass and spontaneous social congregation is an unexpected side-effect of the game as well. Reports of many thousands of people all rapidly congregating in parks as rare creatures appear have been repeatedly reported. It is a sociologically fascinating emergent property of the game. How wonderful if healthcare could trigger the same mass interest, with thousands queuing when Zika vaccination becomes available, or indeed for any number of health prevention activities?

Social media has already taught us a lot about how to deliver health services in new ways. The great potential for games and augmented reality in healthcare is yet to be tapped. We are entering a time when more and more of the population will be embedded in an online social web, and that will be the universe in which we must engage with them, and where healthcare is delivered. And we must embrace that future, because in the end, we #GottaCureEmAll.

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Read more on Enrico’s blog.