What physicians need to know about AI-driven patient motivation solutions

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One of the toughest challenges doctors face today has nothing to do with medicine. Rather, it has to do with motivation — specifically, encouraging patients with multiple chronic illnesses to stay on track with their treatment plans.

Fortunately, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and behavioral science are driving new patient motivation solutions that can take much of this pressure off of doctors’ shoulders — but doctors’ daily routines and workflows will need to evolve to make the most of them.

Doctors can’t coach “want to”

Russ Gagnon
_{© Wellth}

Doctors only have so much face time with each patient. They can’t afford to spend precious minutes reviewing well-worn obstacles and rehashing advice from previous visits. It’s difficult and frustrating for both doctors and patients to feel there’s been little progress, and for each discussion to be focused on retracing past steps rather than setting new goals and finding new tactics for care. Taking this extra time also impairs doctors’ performance in other areas, as research shows that patient visits under significant time pressure result in 6% more planned and 4.5% more unplanned follow-up visits, suggesting lingering problems or patient dissatisfaction.

No matter how productive such repeat conversations about care may seem, once a patient leaves the doctor’s office, the physician often loses all visibility. They can only hope the patient will take their medications and follow their plan.

Familiar tools like remote patient monitoring and wellness apps have tried and mostly failed to solve this problem. The challenge is that such tools require patients to be intrinsically motivated to sustain new behaviors right from the start. As doctors know, this is often not the case, especially if the patient is dealing with social risk factors in addition to chronic illnesses. Without fundamentally addressing patient motivation toward taking medication, most patients will struggle and stop using digital health tools entirely within a few months, falling back to existing habits and routines.

If we want to really help patients and doctors, the first step is to utilize approaches that actually motivate and empower patients to follow their care plans.

The emerging generation of patient motivation tools

Truly effective digital health solutions reflect the psychology that underpins motivation. These patient motivation tools leverage behavioral science principles and AI to form the connective tissue between doctors and patients outside of the care setting. Instead of imposing an overly prescriptive, inflexible approach on patients, these tools deliver a deeply personalized experience that meets each individual where they are, and provides the right incentives to help move them forward one day at a time.

Effective patient motivation is not obsessed with perfection — it’s built with the understanding that a patient who is 80% adherent will fare better than one who tries for perfection, gets fatigued and soon quits altogether. Chronic disease management is a marathon, not a sprint.

These new solutions recognize that — as with any habit — consistent motivation is key to developing healthy behaviors and is made possible by utilizing principles like the endowment effect, loss aversion and confidence building to help each patient develop their own internal motivation. Instead of simply sending a reminder to take a pill, these solutions target the core drivers for long-term behavioral change.

When patients use these platforms, doctors can be confident that the provided incentives — which instill a feeling of progress and capability building — will actually get patients engaged in their own health. Ultimately, these tools empower doctors to focus more on the care itself rather than writing detailed steps and then hoping that patients will follow through.

Unlike standard digital health tools, AI-driven patient motivation solutions don’t experience a steep drop in retention after initial use because the model allows for sustainable motivation and maintains high levels of usage (often exceeding 90%) in the long term.

Patient motivation solutions can’t do all the work themselves, though. To get the most out of these tools, there are some key best practices doctors should look to implement.

Three best practices for physicians to implement in their practices

Based on experience, the following operational steps are key for physicians seeking to maximize the potential of patient motivation solutions with their own patients:

1. Data hygiene: Develop a rigorous data hygiene process in your own practice and stick to it as much as possible. In the AI era, digital health vendors utilize machine learning to determine how their solution can best apply to certain patient population groups and to inform personalization. Those insights rely on having sound data for every patient. When doctors’ practices consistently track the most important data points for each patient, it helps to prime patient motivation solutions for greater success.
2. Engage with the tools: To the extent possible, doctors should stay up to speed on the results of the patient motivation platform they’re using. Patients using these solutions should feel more health literate, they should have more questions about their activities, and you should see more engagement in each visit. Staying up to speed on the results can help you spot areas of opportunity where a patient might be ready to take additional steps to improve their health.
3. Make your voice heard: For physicians whose provider networks are not currently utilizing these kinds of solutions, it can be helpful for doctors to encourage them to explore their options. If enrolling hard-to-reach patients in such a program would be helpful to a doctor’s practice or alleviate the pressures of having to keep track of patients’ medication adherence, it may be prudent to ensure that your provider network is not taking any potentially beneficial tools off the table.

A distinct step forward

The adoption of patient motivation solutions is an effective way of easing the constant pressure on doctors and improving health outcomes for hard-to-reach patients. These solutions are a distinct step forward because they target the drivers of motivation to create lasting behavioral change.

By implementing such solutions, doctors can significantly enhance the quality of care they provide over the long term and reduce the burden of medication adherence for countless patients.

Russ Gagnon is chief product officer at Wellth, a leading science-backed daily care motivation solution that helps members build healthy daily habits and promotes long-term behavior change.