Meet Cognitive Needs to Change Health Behaviors
The McKinsey Quarterly has an excellent article, Engage Consumers to Manage Healthcare Demand, that offers some insights for cognitive designers working on changing health-related behaviors.
The article looks at three approaches to changing behavior:
Education about health and preventative care- Encouraging increased role in selection of healthcare provider and services
- Incentives and disincentive for health behavior change
Nothing new for readers of this blog. But they also point out:
* Effective education requires integrating information from multiple sources and customizing on the basis of an individual’s psychographic profile.
* Encouraging consumers to be more proactive about making choices about services and providers requires providing objective (third party) information on price, quality and availability
* Providing incentives must be targeted on behaviors that are open to incentives (not all are) and should be combined with support programs.
Such refinements reflect an increased understanding and willingness to meet the cognitive needs of the healthcare consumers. We need another dose or 10 of that!
