Drane. “Most people know what they need to do to be healthy, they’re just not inspired in that moment to do it—and that moment can be ‘I reach for chips instead of carrots, I schedule time to be with my kids instead of time to get a mammogram.'”
“What the healthcare industry has done historically is that if we just keep reminding people that mammograms are important then they’ll do it—well, not necessarily,” Drane says. Her company, she says, found that a mammogram reminder with a playful message that anthropomorphized the mammogram machine, saying that it missed the patient, was 30 percent more effective in getting women to have their breasts screened for cancer than traditional messaging.
Seduce Health is now a volunteer effort with much of the staff support coming from Drane’s firm, Eliza. And, clearly, the Seduce Health effort and the for-profit company have some common interests around new ways to get patients to adopt healthy behaviors. Eliza, founded in 1999, has built a profitable business with its multimedia outreach campaigns directed toward patients. Yet, aside from Drane’s bio on Seduce Health’s website, you won’t find much mention of Eliza. “What I tried not to do with Seduce Health is make it an advertisement for Eliza,” Drane says.
Zeiger, too, says that his involvement in Seduce Health is separate from his work at Google. His experience as a practicing physician (yes, he still sees patients even though he works at Google) and patient inspired him to start Seduce Health with Drane. Drane is no stranger to healthcare outreach efforts— in 2008 she founded Engage with Grace to improve the way people talk about end-of-life arrangements.
Drane and Zeiger—who is often the face of Google Health and the Internet giant’s healthcare initiatives—first met back in October 2009 at a health IT conference where they found “in the first eight minutes of rapid-fire conversation an unbelievable amount of shared ideas, passions, fierce beliefs,” Drane says.
After being turned off by billboards in New York with chilling messages about what would happen to diabetics if they didn’t manage their disease, Zeiger reached out to Drane about getting an effort started to change the conversation.
While Seduce Health is a nonprofit effort, there’s a clear business opportunity in inspiring patients to take action in improving their health. Thanks to healthcare reform, insurance companies are going to become eligible for Medicare payment bonuses based on a rating system that is partially determined by how well the insurers do in providing preventive care. That means health plans will have an extra incentive, which kicks in next year, to entice people into getting their cholesterol checked and their bodies screened for tumors.
There have been a variety of ways that people in the medical field have been trying to motivate patients to do what is best for their health, says Tom Hubbard, a senior director at the healthcare think tank NEHI in Cambridge. So-called “patient activation,” he says, is one such school of thought that has led to a variety of methods to measure a patient’s engagement in his health and knowledge of his condition. Then there are ways of interviewing patients that elicit responses to help them realize what is preventing them from living healthier lives, and perhaps to motivate them to overcome such barriers.
“These are not messages of fear and shame or scare—like if you don’t take this, you’re health is going to worsen, and you’re going to end up in the hospital,” Hubbard says.
Drane says that one of her goals at Seduce Health is to get more leaders in mainstream healthcare organizations like health insurance companies to become more open to the new approaches to health communication advocated by the movement.
“We’ve got to wake up every day and make health sexy, we’ve got to make it desirable,” Drane says. “Here’s a great example: if you take care of your diabetes, your skin will look younger.”
