Our behavioural science consulting practice helps healthcare and pharma teams close the gap between what people know and what they actually do. Insight only earns its place in the plan when it changes behaviour — a prescribing habit, a patient's adherence, a treatment choice.

Knowing Isn't Doing: The Behaviour Gap in Healthcare

Roughly 50% of patients with chronic conditions don't take their medication as prescribed — even when they understand exactly what's at stake. Physicians show the same pattern: they know the guideline, but keep prescribing out of habit. More education and more awareness rarely close that gap, because the gap isn't in what people know — it's in the intention–action gap between knowing and doing. Closing it takes a different kind of intervention, designed at the level of behaviour rather than information.

What Is Behavioural Science Consulting in Healthcare?

Behavioural science consulting in healthcare is the practice of applying behavioural economics and psychology to design interventions that change how physicians, patients, and payers actually behave — not just what they know. It draws on an established evidence base of cognitive biases in healthcare decision-making to explain why people don't always act on the information in front of them.

Applied well, it turns findings about physician prescribing behaviour, patient adherence, or treatment choice into a specific, testable intervention — a piece of framing, a workshop, a sales conversation — rather than another slide of recommendations that never leaves the deck.

The four areas below are the behaviours our clients most often ask us to shift. Each is also its own body of ongoing work — over time, each will link out to deeper articles and case material.

HCP Behaviour Change

Changing physician prescribing behaviour usually means working against status quo bias and anchoring to an existing standard of care — the comfortable, familiar option a physician has prescribed for years.

Patient Adherence & Persistence

Non-adherence is rarely a single decision — it's a slow drift driven by present bias (today's convenience beating tomorrow's benefit) and simple forgetting.

Treatment Adoption & Launch Uptake

Treatment adoption in pharma — getting physicians and patients to move to a new treatment — stalls at points of friction in the switching journey: uncertainty about a new mechanism, administrative burden, or simply the effort of changing an established routine.

Message Framing & Treatment Choice

How a treatment choice is framed — as a gain or a loss, as a default or an active choice — measurably changes how physicians and patients respond to it. This is choice architecture applied to healthcare materials and conversations.