"For my colleagues and me, whose task it is to improve population health, we architect specific health interventions because doing so gives us a measurement advantage. Through good intervention design, we (or the intervention's facilitators) can track attendance, program completion, vital signs, functional capacity, clinical labs, and downstream health utilization. Yet, despite our best design efforts, we still chronically face a fundamental challenge: program adherence."
"When intervention attrition inevitably occurs, we often blame the population pool. I mean, discipline is hard, right? So, as behavioral scientists, we play with the variables. We lower the stakes. Maybe we try new nudges, like increasing the reminders, manufacturing accountability, and/or adding more education to amplify the clinical case. But, in my opinion, for too long we've been missing the simplest variable: what the pursuit feels like to the person we hope to engage."
"Even though this phenomenon is well understood academically, I find it's still met with resistance time and time again in medical and/or health settings. To some, it sounds like a whimsical assertion that we need to "entertain" patients and clients. Other times, the resistance is in the form of aversion to treating disease management like a leisure product. Unpacking this resistance is out of scope for this article and will be addressed in a future article."
Population-health interventions are designed to yield measurement advantages by tracking attendance, completion, vitals, functional capacity, labs, and downstream utilization. Despite careful design, program adherence remains a chronic challenge. Common responses modify behavioral variables—lowering stakes, increasing reminders, manufacturing accountability, and adding education—to boost adherence. A simpler but overlooked variable is how the pursuit feels to the participant; enjoyment of the process increases consistency. Evidence shows people stick to activities they enjoy more reliably than those driven solely by logical outcomes. Medical settings often resist framing disease management as pleasurable, yet enjoyment appears paramount to sustained adherence.
Read at Psychology Today
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