Persuasion science for health outcomes.
Most efforts to change health behavior assume people don’t act because they don’t know. They do know. Knowing isn’t doing — and that changes everything about what actually works.
Give people the facts — the risk numbers, the screening guidance, the reasons to take the medication — and behavior will follow. It won’t. Behavior change isn’t an information problem. It’s a persuasion problem: the work of designing for what truly moves people, and then proving, with the rigor of real measurement, that the behavior shifted the outcome that mattered.
Done well, it rests on three things: Persuasion, Proof, and Product. Most efforts have one. The work is in holding all three.
Three ways health behavior change fails
It tried to inform, not persuadeA failure of Persuasion
The patient-education fallacy: a careful, accurate explanation that changes nothing, because facts were never what stood in the way.
It measured activity, not outcomesA failure of Proof
Engagement theater — daily active users, streaks, completion rates — mistaken for behavior change. People were busy in the app. Their health didn’t move.
It leaned on a single clever nudgeA failure of Product
One reminder, one default, one borrowed trick, asked to carry durable change at scale — in a real clinic or product, for people with real lives.
Each is the same mistake wearing different clothes: treating one piece of the work as if it were the whole.
Persuasion, Proof, Product
Persuasion
The behavioral science to know what moves people — drawn from health psychology and the behavior-change literature, not consumer-marketing folklore repackaged for medicine.
Proof
The epidemiological rigor to know whether it worked — whether the behavior you changed truly moved the clinical or business outcome you were after. This is the part the field most often skips, because it is the hardest and the least flattering. It is also the part I was trained to do.
Product
The operator’s discipline to ship it — to translate what the evidence says into something that survives contact with a product roadmap, a care team, a budget, and a human being on the other end.
Any one alone produces something that demos well and dies quietly. Together, they produce change you can defend.
Why the combination is rare
It’s rare because the training rarely overlaps. The people who can read the literature usually haven’t shipped. The people who’ve shipped usually can’t run the analysis that tells them whether it worked. The people who can run that analysis often aren’t in the room where the product gets built.
I sit at that intersection on purpose. Behavioral epidemiologist by training, healthcare entrepreneur by blood — I’ve built and led the products, advised the teams designing the experience, and done the measurement that says whether any of it changed an outcome.
Dr Kate Wolin 