Starting off the morning at the Healthcare Marketing Strategies Summit with Thomas Goetz, author of The Decision Tree, now with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. What follows are my stream-of-consciousness style notes…not exact quotes.
70% of health-care costs [and mortalities] go to behavior-related conditions. How do we get patients engaged in their health care?
Title of the talk: “Old Stories and New Technologies”
Storytelling is important.
Jean Nidetch — Learned about how to lost weight from NYC Department of Public Health — calorie reduction, keep moving — but it was presented in a very scientific, cold way.
Nidetch turned that into something better:
Goal [One of first before/after shots for weight loss]
Process [Evidence, relevance, consequence, action feedback loop]
The results of her spin on the information helped found Weight Watchers.
Weight Watchers still believes the community of the WW meeting is critical to success.
Goetz says, Goal + Process = Story
homo narrans – the idea that humans are driven by stories
To a large degree, we have pushed the existential struggle out of our daily lives in Western society — but of course, some of the evidence of that is also killing us — Goetz shows map of all McDonald’s in US.
We have to counterprogram against civilization. We’ve removed our existential challenges with a system perfectly designed to create bad health [another existential challenge!].
We’ve done a lot of negative health advertising…Goetz shows an anti-drinking ad from Canada that may have actually increased teen drinking, not decreased it. People reject negative ads.
Pinterest is wildly popular because it helps us catalog our hopes and aspirations. How do we tell a health story about our hopes and aspirations?
Goetz gives examples of sites/apps that are working on goal-setting:
Lift
Stickk
Nike FuelBand
Misfit – Attaches to the back of your phone. Aims to remove some of the friction in all the steps of tracking health care.
Basis Watch – Accelerometer but also measures your body’s responses.
Kinsa — Theremometer that plugs into smart phone. Going through FDA approval.
Archimedes IndiGo – Clinical tool, no patient interface yet.
Goetz says, be very cautious about dashboards with patients. Do we give too much information? Is it overwhelming? Are we meeting their health literacy level? Has a friend [missed name] who says, you can’t give people dashboards without giving them a steering wheel.
1. Speak to the individual. The patient is the person we have to design for.
2. Minimize friction. Reduce the amount of effort people have to make to improve their health, track their results, etc.
3. Allow for failure. We have to understand failure is part of the process, and allow for it.
4. Mark progress. We have to celebrate small victories.
5. Make the future visible. Help people see the different paths they have.
When people are building toward a purpose, they tend to have better results. Goetz cites some surveys that shows several specific positive outcomes — lower risk of Alzheimer’s, lower risk of heart attack, increased telomerase activity, etc. — when people have great sense of purpose in their lives.