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May
14

Well-Being Summit 2013

It is that time of year again! The annual Healthways Well-Being Summit is upon me. This year the summit is in New Mexico in Santa Ana Pueblo.

My talk this year is about a topic I have been exploring over the past few months as we look out into the next few years of behavior change software design:

The Next Frontier of Behavior Change - Identity

For the past three years, MeYou Health has been obsessed with small actions. Getting people to do new things and learn about themselves and their well-being in the process has been the cornerstone of our online health interventions.

Small actions have become the darling of behavior change, but are they really changing anyone? MeYou Health has repeatedly seen that although it’s possible to get someone to try something, whether or not that person turns it into a long-term habit depends on a variety of emotional and environmental factors. In the past, MeYou Health used the term “epiphany moment” to refer to the time when change does occur. Now we have a new idea of what this could be: It isn’t so much an epiphany as a change in identity.

I’ve used a variety of sources to pull this together. If you want some insight into where the talk will be headed, check out some of these links! They are listed in no particular order.

I will post the full presentation and prezi after the conference is over!

Apr
24

On Living With Kids

My wife Maureen sent me this snippet from a blog she reads that has a Living With Kids feature. This is from Karey Mackin:

Q: How would you describe your aesthetic? Did it change when you added kids to the mix?

A: If our girls had never happened, Pat and I would live in a sleek contemporary with zero clutter. All white. If you came over to our house, you’d gasp at all the cutting-edge gadgets we’d have. We would both drive shiny cars to and from our shiny jobs. We would have all the time in the world to do everything we wanted to do after work and on weekends, and would plan romantic getaways at least twice a month. Our conversations! Oh, they would be epic and uninterrupted. And it would be the emptiest life and I wouldn’t even know the joy I was missing, which makes it all the more tragic.
So. Very. True.

Apr
14

“Part of knowing how to think is knowing how the laws of nature shape the world around us. Without that knowledge, without that capacity to think, you can easily become a victim of people who seek to take advantage of you”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Mar
12

“When I was growing up, my dad would encourage my brother and I to fail. We would be sitting at the dinner table and he would ask, ‘So what did you guys fail at this week?’ If we didn’t have something to contribute, he would be disappointed. When I did fail at something, he’d high-five me. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was completely reframing my definition of failure at a young age. To me, failure means not trying; failure isn’t the outcome. If I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘I didn’t try that because I was scared,’ that is failure.”

Sara Blakely –  Founder of Spanx

(read more quotes on success)

Mar
07

Gamification is serious business, in Pharma Voice

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A while back I gave a short interview to someone working on a gamification piece. As these things go, I often forget about them, only to be surprised later that they actually appear somewhere online! 

The February 2013 issue of Pharma Voice has my picture in it along with some quotes.

I continue to see gamification as a strong set of patterns for encouraging social experiences. Gaming experience are fulfilling experiences because they provide clear prompts, feedback and incentives for mass participation. If you want to get a group of strangers to know each other, you make a game out of it. Social product designers are realizing that just because a product can be social doesn’t mean it will become so. Break out the games and you can bring people together, find common ground, and rally people through forms of exploration, achievement, storytelling  cooperation and competition. - Markelz

The whole thing is behind a pay wall, so unfortunately you can’t see the entire article. But here is the link anyhow.

Feb
17

Jan
24

Jan
21

My DartTalk - Can Insurance and employers drive product distribution?

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Cort Johnson asked me to give a DartTalk tomorrow (Jan 22, 2013) about my experience running product development at MeYou Health and the challenges and successes we have had working with insurance companies and employers to distribute health and wellness programs. 

The main reasons I took the Head of Product job at MeYou Health was because it was an opportunity to 1) Build a team and product totally from scratch and 2) use the existing contracts and relationships of Healthways to distribute the product to millions of people. 

For the past couple years we have built the product Daily Challenge into an engaging and proven health intervention. This past year we have been deploying it into the market via health plans and employers. The results have been nothing short of educational and I hope the talk reflects that.

It is an exciting time to be in the health industry. I wouldn’t pick to be anywhere else. Here is a set of links that I have pulled together than can help convey the excitement and the opportunity.

Healthcare’s Trillion-Dollar Disruption
A great summary of the massive changes facing the industry. A must read! 

The Volume-to-Value Revolution
This document is referenced in the Forbes article linked above. It clearly describes how the entire industry is facing a shift away from the volume-based model of doing as many procedures as possible and into creating measurable long-term incremental value for consumers. 

How Wal-Mart May Have Just Changes the Game on Health Care
Their “centers of excellence” program creates a competitive market for procedures at a national level, possibly changing the entire system of referrals. 

Xboxification of Healthcare
It covers the challenges of innovating while shackled to old models, and touches on the changes that are coming with the new reimbursement models. It also has the word “Xbox” in it which, as a gamer, I appreciate. :) 

Health Plans: Start your engines and welcome to 2013
A six part blog series about the changing system and how health plans can evolve into consumer-driven businesses.

I plan to update this post after the talk and with other resources as I find them.

Jan
11

“People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.”

Marilynne Robinson

Be mindful of the entire spectrum and the cycles of it in your life. 

Source theparisreview.org

Dec
25