Xeno Acharya

Health behaviour change: the next frontier

When researching for this article I came across a McKinsey article with a similar title (I had thought up my title last night and was feeling pretty smug about it, but was shattered when I discovered the McKinsey article title!) — Changing patient behaviour: The next frontier in healthcare value (Dixon-Fyle, S. et al, 2012; hereon called the McKinsey article). The article is spot on about the criticality of behaviour change in the next wave of healthcare innovation, but was written in 2012, a bit ahead of its time. Some things have changed in the past 10 years while most things have remained the same. Healthcare is an extremely slow-moving industry where the move-fast-and-break-things approach does not work. The McKinsey article describes a ‘person-focused paradigm that uses a behaviourally based rather than disease-based orientation to drive sustainable behaviour change’. Without going into much detail — it describes a winning combination as one that integrates behaviour change into existing care delivery using better patient engagement leveraging the powers of social, technology, and better business models. I will build on this concept in this article and describe why both payers and providers need to start paying attention to this paradigm or risk losing significant market share in the coming decade.