Do the Right Thing

A friend of mine leads a healthcare technology company that’s developing a cool new platform. Her idea is to use technology to reward patients for engaging in their care plans. Basically, she wants to make it fun, rewarding and easy for patients to do the right thing.

It’s amazing, and more than a little embarrassing, that it’s taken so long for someone to come up with this idea. Other areas, from online shopping to language learning to New York Times word games, have been hacking into human motivation for years. Why has it taken us so long in healthcare?

I think the answer is obvious. It’s arrogance.

For far too long, we’ve been content to design care plans around what we think patients should do, rather than what they can or will do. When they “fail” treatment, we chalk it up to “noncompliance,” and exhort them to do better next time. We hold ourselves to a standard of intellectual correctness, but not to actual results.

All of this is beginning to change. Full risk contracts and value-based payments make it increasingly foolish to maintain these attitudes, but old habits die hard. My guess is, we won’t get much better at improving our patients’ health until we pay as much attention to human motivation as we do to human physiology.