Helping Cure Healthcare Systems: Changing Minds and Behaviour

Proactive approaches to chronic disease management need to complement passive-reactive treatment of acute diseases. Such programmes need to be applied across the continuum of care from wellness to prevention to early detection to secondary prevention and to chronic care. Proactive recruitment to action-oriented programmes results in few patients showing up, finishing up or ending up better off and can demoralise patients and professionals. However, programmes matched to each stage of change can produce unprecedented participation and impact rates. Interactive technologies for health behavioural change have the potential to be to behavioural medicine what pharmaceuticals are to traditional medicine. They are the most cost-effective method for delivering the `maximum science' about major health problems to entire populations in user friendly ways and with no known adverse effects.