How can you help patients set realistic health goals and track progress?

Understanding where the Patient is at is fundamentally important. Getting to know the patient, their family life, their food choices, and what they like and dislike, in terms of their health management. Are they comfortable with using technology? Do they prefer attending a clinic in the community, rather than the stress of travelling to a hospital clinic? A number of these factors and only a sample mentioned above, come into play. Achieving the best outcomes for the patient and working with them is key.

To assist patients in setting and realizing their health goals, it's crucial to first help them get clarity on what their successful health image is (See "Think and Live Longer," by Trip Goolsby, MD). It is the patient that is the CEO of her health and ideally, she will surround herself with a supportive community to support her in achieving her health goals. Her physician is her partner chosen by her to help her achieve success in health by keeping her focused, motivated, and accountable - this will significantly contribute to her success in health.

To keep Goals, SPECIFIC; good to start with Health Risk Assessment. This would let the person know the correct status of his/ her health and would motivate to work further. To keep the Goals MEASURABLE, important to make use of Technology which makes it easy. Note that unless a person falls sick, he has very low motivation to act on preventive aspects. Nothing more important than keeping Goals ACHIEVABLE. Note that when simple Goals are achieved, that acts as a motivation and would encourage the person something challenging on later days. HRA done earlier helps to make Goals RELEVANT to immediate priorities. Goals cannot be general & without time line. This too encourages the person.

Technology can assist with not only goal setting but goal tracking and adherence to an improvement plan. A great example is activity. Your smart phone or wearable is already tracking your activity in terms of steps and potentially more. This gives a baseline to start from. Where 10,000 steps a day may be an achievable goal for one 500 could be a real stretch for another. By using this baseline tech can suggest achievable goals and also monitor progress towards them. At my time at Evergeen Life we showed how you could link this wearable data to your GP record, your personal health record and even your genetic markers to provide actionable insights for people to take control of their health outside of a clinical environment.

Most of this was mentioned in (1) by me. However would like to underline the use of Technology. Let us remember that most of the people across the globe has access to smart phone Apps. Often people do shy away from talking with another human but technology can full the gap. Another advantage of let technology do some of the work is - people do not really need to worry about the time. Have simple technology, which would motivate person to interact with it. Complexity drives the people away.

It’s all very well to have SMART goals………. And yes, they help one to keep a focus. However, like many goals in life, resistance, fear of failure, self judgement etc will all show up. It’s important to work with these demons too because these are old unconscious patterns which could sabotage all well intended goals.

Nothing more important than tracking. Use simple technology, take feedback for goals on regular basis; do not make it like end of goal cycle; which is too long. Technology need to work with person on day-to-day basis by reminders, taking feedback, providing motivation and modifying goals instantly based on feedback provided.

There are always going to be Challenges. Note that Less Motivated Person would face more challenges. This is fact of the life. Experience of the Health Coach & Technology would make the difference here. As mentioned earlier daily interaction with the use of Technology is the only way. This way any challenge would be addressed in timely manner, otherwise if the person is contacted after few days; one would find that due to some challenges the person already pulled out of Goals.

Using Surveys or Interviews to measure Outcome is never fruitful or helpful unless the entire work/ exercise is done for academic purpose or get paid for Survey. If the objective is REAL - benefit of the person; collect details regularly and use that data to evaluate outcome. NOTHING ELSE WOULD BE EVER TRUE.