This February, Evive Health celebrates six years and millions of "acts of personalization"

People will make the right decisions in healthcare if they're given the right information, at the right time, in the right way.

We believe that passionately.

Six years ago this February, we came together to put that belief into business. We studied the best practices in retail science, behavioral economics, and consumer behavior. We developed proprietary healthcare analytics software to translate medical coding into usable communication elements. Then, we put the two together to create and deliver our core product of data-driven preventive healthcare reminders, each one as unique as its recipient.

From Day 1, each reminder was personalized with the individual's specific plan coverage and doctor's phone number. It arrived just-in-time before recommended care (like a mammogram or a cholesterol test) was personally due (no “National Awareness” Month campaigns here). Finally, it came packaged with a look and feel that resonated with their demographics, life situation, and cognitive biases.

The right information. The right time. The right way.

And people proved us right: they made the right decisions. We're proud to say we've helped increased preventive care adherence for all of our clients to date, now an overall messaging population of over 2,000,000 people across the country.

The key to our success? Bridging the human gap between health education and actual engagement. Sendhil Mullainathan said it best at his TED talk a few years ago:

Convincing people to do something … is not an act of information. “Let's give them the data, and when they have the data they'll do the right thing.” It's more complex than that.

That overarching complexity is what Sendhil calls the “last mile problem,” the seemingly irrational failure of people to take action on simple, often low-cost, low-effort choices. In our world, the last mile is just picking up the phone and making the doctor's appointment. The act in itself is so simple. But the individual barriers are manifold: cognitive, social, spiritual, economic...

Life gets in the way. In 2,000,000 different ways.

And that's precisely why “acts of information” are not enough to fuel that last mile. Information needs to be enhanced, re-filtered, better represented. In a word, information just needs to be “smarter” if we expect it to drive smarter consumers. Richard Thaler and Will Tucker recently praised the market-changing power of select consumer “choice engines,” services that combine the terms of sale with an individual's usage data, effectively connecting the dots for people to make their best decision in areas as diverse as finance, grocery shopping, and cellphone service.

Call it “smarter information,” call it “consumer engagement.” At the end of the day, we take a look at the healthcare communications that come out of our own “choice engine” and call them like we see them:

“Acts of personalization.” Each as unique as snowflakes, millions strong, and still growing.

Thank you to our customers and friends – and to people, far and wide – for building our knowledge over the past six years of what personalization means in communications, how it changes from person to person, and just what a difference it can make in making “the last mile.”

Let's keep running.