How to use employers to improve healthcare
The solution to the healthcare system isn't fixing the existing system says HealthMaker Adam Bosworth, cofounder and CTO of Keas. In this video, he explains how he thinks healthcare should be fixed and who we should focus on to fix it.
Transcript
And I think the way we fix it, to be quite honest, is the way we fix lots of systems that are broken. It's a disruptive innovation.
You don't go to the existing system to try and fix it. It's impossible. You build a better solution elsewhere and people transfer.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The solution is not to go to health care. It's to go to the people who actually pay the bills for health care, which are employers,
and get them to provide incentives to their employees to change their lifestyle. Now, to put this in perspective, two thirds of us
are overweight, one half of us are dangerously overweight, and 100 million Americans are obese or worse, meaning they're in serious harm's way.
So this isn't a few people. This is 100 million Americans right now, and there's another 50 million out there who will be obese in five or 10 years the way they're going.
And in that environment, you have to give them an alternative that they want. The problem is not a lack of supply.
We're generating more and more supply of wellness initiatives. The problem is a lack of demand, and there's no demand for this.
They don't want to do this. And so you have to come up with something they want. Number one, and most importantly, is provide some that's fun because people simply
won't show up if it's not fun. And conversely, very rarely do they get to do something fun in the workplace. In our case, that's a game.
A game all by itself would not be a solution, but the thing is you will show up. All of a sudden, you get to do something fun and enjoyable
that triggers all of the things that a game triggers. And a game itself is a lot like a Big Mac. There's an instant dopamine hit.
You do something. You get points. You get rewards. You get badges. You feel good. Couple that with a social network-- not of people you don't know, there's
no value in that, but of people whose respect you care about. And in this regard coworkers Interestingly
turn out to be better than friends. And it's not because you don't care about your friend's opinion, but you sort of expect your friends to cut you slack.
But at work you want to look like a kind of person that people can depend on and respect, so your coworkers are people you know but they're
people whose respect you want. Third thing is, make sure everyone is in the same boat. A lot of what we see in health care
is singling out the people who are sick. It's natural because they cost the most money. The things you need to do, whether you are sick
or whether you are risking being sick or are not are the same. Fundamentally, you have got to eat less crap. You've got to eat more veggies.
You have got to eat less. You have got to learn how to cope with stress, and you have to work out. That's it, so you don't have to stigmatize the sick.
And the game, of course, is rigged so you do more and more of these four things. The more of them you do, the better you do. That's your encouragement model because people
when they play a game naturally play a game to do well. And then lastly, peer pressure. People have a responsibility to a small group.
That is much, much stronger than a responsibility to an organization they just happen to be part of. And still stronger yet, if they pick them.
So the ingredients are make it fun, provide a huge amount of social support from your coworkers,
and at the same time, provide a certain amount of peer pressure from a small number of the co-workers you've chosen as your peer pressure elements.
A lot of our focus is on building habits over the first 10 weeks to 12 weeks. But once you've done that, it's really easy to sustain it,
and that's the thing we're trying to do. [AUDIO LOGO]
health care
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