How The Words Used In Health Care
Help Keep Us Sick
…and what we can do about it
Why focus on words in healthcare?
When we learn to see how words used in healthcare can misdirect us, suddenly everything changes. We view our options more clearly. We gain more agency to take care of those we love. We can make much better choices that lead to better health.
This project was featured at:
Julie Fox - Speaker Programs
Help each person in your organization make better decisions about health
In health care, study after study shows that individuals’ actions are the main determinants of their health outcomes. We need to harness the power of words to influence people to take better actions, including giving people the tools to do this themselves. Why leave this most important tool in the toolbox, unused, when we could start influencing people…including influencing ourselves…to have the better health we all deserve?
Programs
Better Words for Better Decisions
in Health Care
Until we learn to recognize how words affect us, particularly in health, we can’t reverse when they get in the way of our best thinking.
This speech/workshop will introduce:
Why words matter so much when it comes to our health – and how lessons from brands apply
What are ‘The Big Five?’ - the words that affect, and can derail, everyone’s decision-making around health
How to see through words the way brand strategists do – Proactive strategies to identify, challenge, and change words before they misdirect you in health care
How Words Define Our Role
in Health Care
What happens when we don’t even notice how labels define our own roles in our health care? What happens to our agency, our choices, and everyone’s understanding of who’s got the ball? What does research say about how that can impact our health, and the health of those we love?
This speech/workshop will unpack:
How what we all call ourselves in health matters, how that drives decisions, and what we should do about it
Why job titles matter in every other part of life – and how it does here too
Breakthrough strategies that use the power of words to become more effective in your own health care
TalkSick
How the Words Used in Healthcare Help Keep Us Sick
…and what we can do about it
Upcoming Book
What we call things matters — Especially in health care.
TalkSick: How the Words Used in Healthcare Help Keep Us Sick began as a book and research project, both of which are still in process.
I started this project after witnessing a friend’s health crisis, where words tragically impacted medical decisions. This work explores what healthcare words are doing the most harm, why, and what we can do to change them.
Until now, in healthcare, words have been an unseen influencer, for individuals and medical professionals, alike. The words we use, and those we accept, create our assumptions and expectations. They direct thinking for the decisions we make, or even think are possible. Words can be one of our most important health care tools, or they can do the most damage. Whether it’s intentional or not, they change outcomes.
TalkSick exposes how changing just a handful of words in health care can change our health care decisions for the better.
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For over 25 years as CEO of Brandbuilders Strategy Consulting, I’ve focused on how to use words to shape thinking about a brand. After experiencing my close friend’s deadly medical cascade, I’ve learned that we don’t notice how words are hard at work in the background, whether they’re influencing which brand to buy or which fork in the road to take in health care decisions. The difference is that companies invest many millions of dollars to research, think through, and communicate the words that best motivate consumers to buy their products over a competitors’. Businesses know this works. But we’re all operating in the dark when it comes to how words are at work on us in health, when the decisions they influence can mean life or death. That’s why TalkSick will hand over the keys to this powerful tool, to show you how to use it to improve your decisions in health.
The coolest thing is this. It may seem like a little tweak, but this can save lives. Unlike medicine or surgery or any therapy, the results from what this shares can be immediate. We don’t need to wait for someone to change ‘the healthcare system.’ We don’t need to convince anyone other than ourselves how to change the words that impact every assumption we make around health. It will help each of us start making better decisions, for our own health, and for those we care about, right here, right now, today.
Please notify me when the book is available
Julie Fox
MBA, Columbia University
Julie Fox is a brand positioning expert, author, researcher, change-maker, and word activist. Her research and writing focuses on the words used in health care, and how better words can help people make better decisions.
Julie’s focus on the power of words comes from more than 25 years as CEO of Brandbuilders Strategy Consulting, and leading major brands at other companies. But Julie’s drive to fix the impact of the words used in health care was born of necessity. Her research and book - "How the Words Used in Healthcare Help Keep Us Sick,’’ is inspired by the death of a friend, when the words used during her health care, in part, led to the tragic outcome.
Julie recently presented on this topic at Harvard, TEDx, and to healthcare leaders at both the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s National Forum and Mass General Brigham’s Healthcare Innovation Workshop.
At Brandbuilders, Julie’s work across many categories helped decode what matters to people enough to change their behavior, with clients including Abbott Labs, Benjamin Moore, Colgate Palmolive, Dean Foods, Energizer, Hallmark, Merck KGA, Procter & Gamble, Safelite, T. Rowe Price, and Unilever.
In life before Brandbuilders, Julie led brands at Procter & Gamble, where she initiated the strategy that took Pantene from 1% share to worldwide leader in haircare, and at Keds where, as VP of Marketing, she repositioned and built the brand, introducing their most successful product line.
Brandbuilders’ trademark is detecting strategic opportunities for exponential growth by connecting the dots in ways others don’t imagine, finding the dots others overlooked, and inspiring deep connection that motivates people to act. Julie finds helping people connect the dots for how words influence our decisions in health care the most important use of decades of experience.
Let’s cure the words in healthcare that help keep us sick.
