A recent Fortune article on big data in healthcare quoted Dr. Brennan Spiegel, a physician-scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center as saying, “Digital health is not a computer science or an engineering science; it’s a social science and a behavioral science,” in the context of a discussion on the hype-evidence gap in digital health. He tweeted the same line back in August, eliciting hundreds of retweets and shares.
Spiegel has cited his own failure experience from attempting to build health technology whilst not addressing behavioral factors like patient motivation, engagement, and long-term adherence. He has elaborated, “Creating the tech isn’t the hard part. The hard part is using the tech to change patient behavior.“ As behavioral scientists, we are encouraged to see increasing value placed on behavioral science in a space that has generally been a slow adopter of it—after all, chief behavioral officers in digital health companies are still unicorns.