1% Improvement = $77B Less in Health Costs
As we work our way through healthcare reform, innovative designs that help people with chronic conditions change their behaviors (learn self care techniques) are absolutely essential. This point is made forcefully in a short review of the George Halvorson’s book, Healthcare Reform Now! on the Influencer Blog:
“Halvorson’s book targets five common chronic conditions—asthma, congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, depression, and diabetes. Together, these five conditions account for 75 percent of our healthcare spending. We would save $77 billion if we could successfully treat even 1 percent of the people with these chronic conditions. And the key to treatment is influencing behavior.”
In my course of cognitive design we reverse engineer some of the most successful chronic disease management programs to see what makes them tick.
There is no rocket science involved but instead a few basic principles:
1. Focus on the most basic actions and behaviors that are essential to self-care. Dramatically lower the cognitive load involved in learning the new techniques even at the risk of oversimplification.
2. Require the patient to meet regularly with professionals individually or in groups to receive instruction, feedback, encouragement and coaching on how to overcome lapses in self-regulation.
3. Put the program in the hands of health professionals that can exhibit a true sense of caring and empathy and are able to nurture a sense of pride and accomplishment in the patients they work with.
4. Embed doing the new behaviors and self-care techniques into the activities of daily living so that they are unavoidable or at least very hard to avoid.
Solutions can be low or high tech but the focus on simplicity, essential behaviors, positive emotional states and caring coaching on self-regulation is what makes these programs very effective from a cognitive standpoint.
