Expert insight by Diana Heimberg, CELforPharma faculty member of Applied Behavioural Science for HCP & Patient Engagement
Across the healthcare industry, teams are increasingly confronted with a persistent challenge: despite strong scientific evidence and extensive communication efforts, achieving meaningful behaviour change among HCPs and patients remains difficult.
Traditional engagement approaches — often centred on rational information and clinical data — frequently fall short because they overlook a central driver of decision-making: human psychology.
Behavioural science offers a powerful lens for understanding and influencing real-world behaviours. Rather than assuming that knowledge automatically leads to action, it examines the subconscious processes, contextual factors, and motivational forces that shape how people think and decide in everyday practice.
📌 Understanding behaviour as a strategic advantage
Behavioural science is not a soft skill; it is a rigorous discipline grounded in decades of evidence. Its relevance to healthcare engagement lies in its ability to uncover the psychological drivers behind decisions — including biases, heuristics, emotions, habits, and environmental cues.
Recognising these determinants enables organisations to predict how stakeholders will respond to information, choose between options, or persist in certain behaviours. This makes behavioural insight a strategic tool for shaping prescribing patterns, improving patient adherence, and enhancing the effectiveness of medical communication.
🛠️ Designing interventions that shift real-world behaviour
Successful behaviour change interventions go beyond simply providing more data or refining message clarity. Behavioural science highlights the importance of designing solutions that:
- reduce cognitive load
- align with existing mental models
- leverage behavioural cues and nudges
- personalise messages to motivational needs
- address contextual barriers that hinder action
Such interventions help HCPs and patients adopt new behaviours more easily by working with human psychology rather than against it.
💬 Motivation and engagement: critical yet under-addressed
A core principle in behavioural science is that behaviour emerges from more than capability or knowledge. Motivation — both intrinsic and extrinsic — plays a decisive role in whether individuals adopt and sustain a desired action.
Within healthcare engagement, this means creating conditions that:
- foster authentic motivation
- increase involvement and personal relevance
- reinforce progress and positive experiences
- maintain engagement over time
When these behavioural drivers are integrated, engagement efforts deliver significantly stronger outcomes.
📊 Making smarter decisions about where to invest
Behavioural diagnosis helps teams identify which levers will yield the greatest impact. Rather than investing broadly across many tactics, behavioural insights enable:
- prioritisation of high-impact behavioural barriers
- elimination of low-value activities
- optimisation of resources and budgets
This results in interventions that are not only more effective but also more efficient, an increasingly important consideration in competitive and budget-constrained environments.
🔄 Building systems that learn and evolve
Behaviour does not remain static. As contexts shift, motivations change, and new barriers emerge, engagement strategies must adapt. Behavioural science supports continuous improvement by encouraging organisations to:
- clearly define the behavioural outcomes they aim to achieve
- measure progress in behavioural terms
- adjust strategies based on evidence
This iterative approach makes engagement more responsive, more targeted, and more aligned with organisational goals.
🌍 A new imperative for healthcare engagement
Diana Heimberg’s expert perspective underscores a growing industry realisation: the effectiveness of HCP and patient engagement hinges on understanding how behaviour actually works. Behavioural science equips teams with the frameworks, methods, and psychological insights needed to design strategies that influence decision-making more reliably and ethically.
As healthcare systems become more complex and expectations from stakeholders continue to rise, behavioural science is emerging not as a supplementary skill but as a foundational capability for achieving meaningful, measurable behaviour change.
🎓 If you want to:
- Understand how the brain’s 90/10 decision-making process impacts behaviour and how Applied Behavioural Science can improve HCP and patient engagement.
- Identify the most impactful subconscious biases and heuristics that drive prescribing, adherence, and communication outcomes.
- Learn to apply the COM-B model to assess and influence behaviour through the right behaviour change strategies.
- Expert guidance and use cases on neuroplasticity enhancing techniques that can effectively change behaviour through communications.
- Explore real-world examples of how pharma teams use tools like eye tracking, EEG, and voice analysis to measure and guide behaviour change.
- Gain practical techniques such as priming, the 5% rule, and emotional storytelling to apply behavioural insights in your everyday work.
👉 Attend Diana Heimberg's 1-day course:
Applied Behavioural Science for HCP & Patient Engagement
With Diana Heimberg
