You may have noticed that we’ve revamped our website significantly. Well, some of you might have. A lot of you might be discovering us for the first time. So let’s take a few minutes to give you a flavor of who we are and what we do.

What is Way To Health?

"We are what we repeatedly do"

We, as individuals, spend 5000 waking hours during the course of a year. Physicians call it the 5,000-hour problem. If you have a common chronic condition such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes, the expert in charge of your health for almost all of your 5,000 waking hours annually is — you. And, frankly, you won’t always make the best choices. Faculty and researchers from across the University of Pennsylvania and other renowned institutions have conducted and continue to research direct patient engagement and behavioral economics based interventions aimed at reducing the disease burden from major U.S. public health problems. Way to Health was born from their frustration around the lack of a platform to quickly develop, test and scale out their ideas.

Way To Health was initially designed as a research tool for behavioral economics research i.e.

• Perform randomized controlled trials for patient engagement and associated behavior change.
• Apply behavioral economics and other strategies to the patient population
• Report on those changes

But over time, the platform has evolved to become a research platform for patient engagement in general. None of us quite know what will work to motivate the patient over the course of those 5000 hours to lead the change needed to make themselves healthier. Way To Health is the platform to research, discover and apply personalized engagement strategies to improve health outcomes. We have big plans that we will talk about more in the coming weeks and months.

Why re-design the website?

We’ve been around for a while and our website hadn’t had an update in quite a few years. That’s the simplest explanation. At a more macro level, we felt that it was time that we communicated all the things that we enable and the value that we bring to not only researchers but also to the health system that we’re a part of. We will be describing more of that work in our projects.

Website plans

We feel that this is just the beginning. There is a lot of information that we’d like to share that hopefully, everyone can benefit from. Some of those plans are described below.

Regular blog content

You will see a lot more content in here ranging from thought pieces to news. We hope to update this blog on monthly basis to begin with and a weekly basis shortly thereafter.

The ABCs - The Academy for Behavioral Changes

Behavioral change is the blockbuster drug of the 21st century. Other have written about patient engagement being that blockbuster drug but patient engagement, we believe, is only possible with accompanying behavioral change. Look for a series of posts focusing on learnings from leaders and innovators in the space.

Case Studies and more

We believe that innovation should not be restricted just to the organization that enabled it. Sharing successes (and equally importantly failures) is critical. Solving healthcare is an enormous challenge. We can all learn from each other and any improvement that we can individually make happen can be applied and improved by someone else to make all of our lives better.

We’re glad that you’ve discovered us and hope that you’ll continue to come back. We’ll shortly be putting up a subscribe button on our blog and the ABC and hope that you’ll subscribe.

Welcome to Way to Health