Fighting Healthcare Forgetfulness

Can a simple prompt to make a wellness-related plan of action help people overcome forgetfulness that might be impeding their best intentions? For employees, the solution may be as simple as a design change to form-letter reminders. By The Wharton School In work, as well as in life, forgetfulness often impedes our best intentions. And in both settings, a failure to remember can have significant implications. Forgetting to schedule an annual check-up at the doctor's office could lead to a serious medical problem going undiscovered. The cost of neglecting regular meetings with a mentor could lead to the loss of a valuable contact. And a missed deadline on one component of a project can upend the schedule of the entire enterprise. Is there any way to get past what would appear to be a common human foible? In a recent paper, Using Implementation Intentions Prompts to Enhance Influenza Vaccination Rates, Wharton operations and information-management professor Katherine Milkman argues that in some situations, the solution is as simple as a design change to form-letter reminders. Milkman and co-authors John Beshears of Stanford University, James J. Choi of Yale University and David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian of Harvard University found that participation in workplace flu-vaccination clinics went up among employees who were sent a flier that prompted them to fill in blank spaces on the handout with a specific date and time when they planned to come in to get a shot. Forgetfulness is a big part of why people don't take preventative health actions; they mean to, but when it comes down to it, they don't remember, Milkman says. One solution is to help people make a concrete plan. What is unusual in this case was that the employees weren't being held to that plan by a doctor or a boss. According to Milkman, past research shows that people like to be thought of as dependable, and keeping commitments is part of that. But most of the time, when you make a commitment, it isn't invisible; you make a commitment to someone, she notes. It's unusual to make a commitment to no one, but our study shows that even making a plan that only you see is tremendously effective. The researchers partnered with Evive -- a Chicago-based healthcare communications company that contracts with businesses to provide wellness tips and information to employees -- to test the power of different styles of reminders to attend flu-vaccination clinics at a large Midwestern utility firm with multiple work sites. Employees at the firm were assigned to receive one of three mailings about the upcoming vaccination clinics, which were free and conducted on-site. The control group received a flier that simply listed the dates and times when the shots would be available. A second group received a sheet that listed the dates and times, but also prompted each employee to privately write down the day he or she planned to get the shot. Mailings for a third group specifically asked workers to privately write down a specific day and time for visiting the clinic. In the end, employees in the third group who received the date and time prompts had a 37.3-percent participation rate in the vaccination clinics -- 4.2 percent more than the control group. Those in group two who received date prompts also had a higher participation rate than the control group, but the increase was not statistically significant. In most models where individuals fail to take an action that is in their long-run best interest, the mechanism that causes the failure is an overweighting of the immediate costs of the action or a lack of relevant information, the authors write. This study suggests that the lack of a concrete plan for implementing a desired action can also contribute to gaps between an individual's intentions and actions. The positive effect of the prompt to make a concrete plan of action was particularly noticeable at work sites where the vaccination clinic was only scheduled for one day -- where it was arguably more critical not to forget. At those locations, participation rates were 7.9 percent to 9.5 percent higher among employees who received planning prompts as opposed to fliers simply listing the dates and times of clinics. We think this is a really powerful tool for helping people remember to avail themselves of preventative health services, including colonoscopies, mammograms and primary-care visits, says Milkman, noting that Evive is already implementing this insight into its new mailings. According to Milkman, the paper is part of a growing field of research into the power of nudges in spurring people to take a particular action. Traditionally, companies and other entities try to change behavior by fining, taxing or otherwise punishing those who fail to do something or rewarding those who do it. But that approach may be viewed as draconian by employees, and it pulls in both workers who never intended to complete a particular task, and those with good intentions and poor follow-through. Our nudge only helped the people who wanted a flu shot in the first place, Milkman points out. We were not coercing people into anything. Beyond public health, Milkman says the study has implications for any task where forgetfulness often interferes with completion rates. There are an enormous number of tasks in organizations that employees frequently forget to do, even though they mean to get to them and know they are important. Republished with permission from Knowledge@Wharton , the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 管理新知 您可能感兴趣的文章 员工激励避“雷”妙法 2016-08-04 如何避免员工心怀不满？尝试这10种方法 2015-07-15 The Psychology of Crowds 2012-10-30 最近文章 嫖娼被抓不属无故旷工，公司解雇赔4万！（法院判决） 2018年01月15日 如何判断你是否具有HRBP胜任力？

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