Today, healthcare payers and providers endlessly wrestle with three alligators—rising costs, inconsistent quality, and the uninsured. These alligators seem to grow larger and stronger with every passing year.

Dennis Schmuland

Granted, consumers need far better information than they have today to make value-based decisions, but better information alone won't drain the swamp. That's because, in the context of reducing disease prevalence, information itself is only valuable to the extent that it enables sustainable behavior changes among consumers.

We need to first recognize that self-service portals must begin to adapt to consumers' daily life, their preferences, and their online interactions. Health plans and providers, instead of passively waiting for consumers to adapt their lifestyles to member service portals, need to exploit a new generation of direct-to-consumer channels and software agents that will, digitally, go where consumers go.

Second, health plans and providers will need to activate consumers to change their health habits by equipping consumers with personal health enablement software to promote incremental behavior changes in the direction of better self-management and better health habits. Personal health enablement software will need to:

• Increase the impact and extend, rather than replace, human coaches, care managers, and providers by politely engaging consumers in conversations at the appropriate time;
• Ask consumers to report daily or weekly progress, such as weight, blood pressure, glucose levels, servings of vegetables and fruit, and exercise;
• Provide instant feedback on self-monitoring to shape and reinforce health behaviors;
• Remind consumers to take medications, get preventive tests, see their physician based on their risks;
• Offer tips on exercise, portion control, healthy snacks, meal tracking, and calorie content;
• Allow consumers to ask for help in their own words; and
• Seamlessly escalate any issue, along with documentation logs, to a live coach, customer service agent, or personal physician in situations that are too complex or personal.