Enabling Healthy Decisions

After my post the other night about analyzing your writing, I had a chance to talk with a technology company about how they digest and use text from things like letters, e-mails, and call recordings.  It was fascinating.  They were describing to me a system they developed for the military which is now available commercially.

They can take all these communications and use them as part of a segmentation or targeting model that is based on patient behavior.  How great (and scary) would that be?  (Big Brother is always watching.)  Imagine that you have a model that tries to identify how to best incent a person to improve their health.  If you could input any e-mails or letters they have sent into your company and input any call recordings using speech to text, you would have all types of indicators about personality and interests along with communication modes, time of day that they respond to information, etc.

Obviously, a patient-centric healthcare model means really understanding things about people.  To do that, we have to get multi-dimensional and think differently.  Rather than simply focusing on moving people to mail order from retail, shouldn’t you focus on attracting the people that are most likely to stay with it and not move right back?  If you are going to offer an incentive for taking a Health Risk Assessment, don’t you want to offer it only to the people that will act on the results?

Compliance with prescriptions or testing is a great example.  There are certain people that are more inclined to stay compliant.  But, it is also important to understand what message will motivate them to stay compliant – not dying, seeing their kids get married, saving money, not missing work, etc.

And, because we are in healthcare, there are some legal constraints about when you can make different offers within the same or similar populations.