How Do We Influence Patient Decisions?
How much time to do you spend trying to influence patient decisions?
Buy a product. Agree to a therapy. Make a lifestyle change.
I would argue that not only do you spend a LOT of time attempting to influence decisions, but your success both clinically and financially DEPENDS on your ability to do it successfully.
This topic highlights a major difference between patient education and effective communication. Patient education involves a transfer of knowledge, heavily grounded in logical reasons for doing something.
Guess what... most of our decisions are not grounded in logic, they are grounded in emotion.
This has been proven through neuroscience and there is actually a very good reason we depend on emotion (even at the expense of sound logic) to help us navigate a complex world. I'll explain that in more detail next week.
In this week's video, I offer an example of a communication tool that very effectively taps into the patient's emotional motivators.
When it comes to getting people to take action, it very often has less to do with WHAT you say as opposed to HOW you say it.