This is the first in our series titled “Chronic Monday,” which will highlight pertinent issues in the chronic disease community.
According to a study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, learning that you are about to develop diabetes isn’t enough to trigger the behavior changes necessary to stave off the disease. Compounding the challenge for prevention advocates is this statistic: approximately one of every three adults in America are prediabetic, but less than 10 percent of them are aware of it. As many of us already know, diabetes is one serious disease with life threatening implications. According to the American Diabetes Association, more than 65% of people with diabetes will die from heart disease or stroke.
But many of us in the health care communications also know that giving folks the hard facts or the scary statistics will not address the perpetual persuasion challenge. This has gotten me thinking more and more about the study of behavioral economics and how we might apply that discipline directly to the art of communications.
There are three main ideas that form the backbone of behavioral economics and the Center for Cost-Effective Consumerism has done a great deal of thinking about using these principles to help people make better (and maybe even more cost effective) choices when it comes to health care. The first, loss avoidance, looks at our tendency to avoid loss rather than actively seek out potential gain. The second principle addresses the notion of peer-to-peer comparison (imagine the OPower model applied to healthcare). The final principle focuses on the idea of procrastination and how people will put off doing something if it doesn’t entail a near-term gain. This last one might account for why screening for chronic disease doesn’t always result in homerun compliance.
Increasingly, as we look for meaningful success measures for communications initiatives, we will have to consider not only the level of health literacy and the scientific data but also the psychology behind the decisions people make. We are increasingly counseling our clients that before even initiating a campaign, it is critical to go on a listening tour and take a true pulse check of the audiences you want to reach and influence. With people becoming ever more vocal online, this presents a tremendous opportunity to implement programs with messages and stories that can be continually refined in real time.