A New Day, Part 4

My most recent entry in this "New Day" series discussed the great potential to harness technology and innovation to improve health outcomes. Massive opportunity, but it will also take the focused skills of communication and influence for that potential to be realized.

The pandemic has given us demonstration of the massive costs that a health crisis can cause: the personal economic costs of individuals unable to work: the local and national costs of reduced economic activity: the medical costs of treating people: the mental health costs of being ill and the civic costs of people being confined to their home and obliged to wear face masks in public places.

Initially, the main defenses against the spread of the virus had been neither medical nor technical, but behavioral: avoiding crowded places, practicing social distancing, wearing a mask, washing your hands often, using hand sanitizers and not touching your face. These were often new behaviors and they didn't come easily to most people – they had to be communicated, learned and maintained. Evidence indicated that infection rates were lower where people adopted these behaviors and higher where people had either not adopted them or became lax. The pandemic has shown us yet again that behavior is a crucial factor in health, and behavioral change is the domain of communication and persuasion.?

Many in the healthcare business have a particular talent for communication, arguably driven by the desire to integrate disparate parts into functioning networks and a can-do spirit for making it happen. Assembling networks of affiliates across the country is how the great broadcasting networks ABC, CBS and NBC came to dominate American radio and TV for much of the 20th century. Integrating content production and distribution made Hollywood the center of the global movie industry in the 20th century. Now in the 21st century, Netflix, Disney, Apple, and others are doing the same with their streaming platforms.

Honing the art of influence has gone hand-in-hand with networking communication. All of this adds up to huge investments in reaching people and extensive expertise in persuasion, influence and shaping behavior. It has certainly been highly effective in influencing the nation’s willingness to spend money. People have bought into the infinite variety of consumer products available in the marketplace, including some of the health and wellness products I covered earlier. In the pharmaceutical segment alone, annual spend on marketing drugs, disease awareness campaigns, and health services increased from $17.7 in 1997 to over $30 billion today. Anyone watching the Super Bowl just last week saw several health and wellness-related advertisements from Hologic, Cue Health and others.?

All of that investment has been highly effective in selling products that are about health. It has increased people’s awareness of diseases and medicine and technical terms such as hypertension and cholesterol. But how effective has it been in helping us to take action to improve their health and wellness? My sense is that it has been less effective than it should have been. And much less effective than it could be. Why is this so?

Here's a thought: to date, the three strands of medicine, technology and communication have worked well enough separately in their own domains. While there has been some cross-over between the domains, it’s not enough for any of them to leverage their respective strengths into an integrated whole with a clear goal. That goal must be to promote actions that improve the health, enhance the well-being and build the resilience of individuals and ultimately of whole communities.

Meaningful patterns and useful insights drawn from the large-scale collection of data, and the application of machine learning and analytics are the foundation of the health ecosystem of the future. These and other key components of integrated health are beginning to enable a vision of personalized healthcare tailored to optimize benefits and outcomes.?

The key piece will be integrating it all into adaptive experiences driven by intelligent services that are truly effective in creating positive behavior change. Up next.?