The convention h as organized the process of health care into interactions between a clinician and a patient. But even patients with chronic illness may spend only a few hours a year with a physician, as compared with the thousands of waking hours when so much of what determines their health occurs out of clinicians’ reach. Some strategies for engaging patients during their daily lives, such as remote monitoring, still rely on busy clinicians, whose time is expensive. Other approaches rely on community health workers whose services cost less and who often reside in the same neighborhoods as the patients they serve.
Largely untapped are existing, organizing ways of cost-free social interactions with friends and relatives who are already embedded in patients’ lives . Existing social relationships have the additional advantage of being highly influential. Growing a mustache for “Movember”…
