The Importance of Behavior Change in Healthcare Settings

Healthcare technology has long promised to revolutionize patient care. While it’s true that innovations from electronic health records to smart monitoring systems have transformed what’s possible in modern healthcare settings, it’s becoming increasingly evident that technology alone is not enough to drive lasting improvements in clinical outcomes. 

In the last few decades, it has played out time and time again: a technology is implemented with high hopes and great fanfare, yet six months later, compliance rates remain unchanged, staff frustration is high, and the promised reductions in infection rates or improvements in efficiency have not materialized.

The fundamental truth that many healthcare organizations learn the hard way is that technology alone cannot drive meaningful change. The missing piece isn’t in the software or hardware, but in the human element: behavior change. Whether implementing electronic health records, real-time location systems, or hand hygiene monitoring solutions, sustainable improvement requires addressing the complex human factors that influence daily clinical practice.

Why Behavior Change Is So Challenging in Healthcare

Healthcare professionals face a slew of challenges when it comes to adopting new behaviors:

• High-stress environments with competing priorities
• Established routines developed over years of practice
• Varying shift patterns that make consistent training difficult
• Limited time for new initiatives amid patient care demands
• Mixed teams with different backgrounds, experience levels, and motivations

As a result, even the most promising initiatives often fail to gain traction, leaving organizations back at square one—but now with depleted budgets, wasted time, frustrated staff, and the original problems still unsolved.

Evidence-Based Principles for Effective Behavior Change

Research in behavioral psychology and change management offers several strategies that can be used to promote sustainable behavior change. Here are a few key principles that have proven effective across healthcare settings:

1. Provide Clear Communication About the Change

Communication is non-negotiable for successful behavior change in healthcare. All major change management models emphasize the importance of clear, consistent messaging throughout the entire implementation process. Staff need to understand not just what is changing, but why it matters to patient care. 

Effective healthcare communication explains the rationale behind new hand hygiene protocols or documentation requirements in terms of patient outcomes and safety. Multiple communication channels—from staff meetings and shift huddles to visual reminders and electronic updates—ensure messaging reaches clinicians across different shifts and departments. Ideally, this communication is maintained throughout the change process, addressing concerns and reinforcing the connection between new behaviors and improved patient care.

2. Involve Stakeholders at All Levels of the Organization

Successful change initiatives actively engage all levels of the team—leadership, middle management, and frontline staff. Research shows that when stakeholders are involved in the change process, they develop greater commitment to its success. Involving stakeholders includes securing visible support from leadership, such as an infection preventionist gaining endorsement from the Chief Nursing Officer in rolling out a new hand hygiene protocol. 

Creating genuine engagement means actively listening to staff concerns, incorporating their feedback to refine implementation approaches, and including them in decision-making whenever possible. When clinical staff are invited to share their concerns, they become partners in the change rather than recipients of it.

3. Focus on Organizational Culture

Change management research consistently identifies organizational culture as a critical factor in sustainable change. Without addressing underlying cultural elements, organizations often revert to previous patterns.

How to apply it:

• Identify cultural barriers to desired behaviors
• Work with opinion leaders who can influence cultural norms
• Create environments that reinforce new behaviors
• Recognize that sustainable change requires cultural alignment

4. Align Change with Organizational Mission and Vision

Change initiatives that clearly connect to an organization’s mission and vision gain greater traction. This alignment provides staff with context, purpose, and a “why” that helps them understand the importance and rationale behind the change.

How to apply it:

• Explicitly link new behaviors to organizational values and goals
• Demonstrate how the change supports the organization’s broader mission
• Use the vision to create a compelling case for change
• Ensure leadership messaging reinforces these connections

5. Provide Encouragement and Celebrate Short-Term Wins

Research shows that recognizing progress motivates ongoing commitment to change in healthcare environments. Creating and celebrating measurable short-term goals builds momentum for sustainable improvements. For example, this might look like weekly compliance rate updates displayed prominently in unit workstations, or recognition of units that achieve specific improvement thresholds. Especially in hospital settings where staff face numerous competing priorities, visible progress helps maintain focus on important initiatives.

Expertise in Action: The SwipeSense Approach

While understanding these principles is essential, implementing them effectively requires expertise and a systematic approach. At SwipeSense, years of experience working with healthcare organizations have led to the development of our Hand Hygiene Acceleration Pathway—a structured methodology designed to drive sustainable behavior change.

Christine, Vice President of Partner Success at SwipeSense, has spent nine years helping hospitals successfully leverage technology. With a double major in Communications and Psychology from UGA, her approach to behavior change is informed by both academic foundation and personal motivation—her passion for infection prevention stems from her family of doctors, and the tragic loss of her grandmother to a healthcare-associated infection after being hospitalized for a stroke.

“Change is hard,” Christine explains. “Each organization has their own internal competing priorities, and it’s easy to get distracted by all of the urgent activities that come with taking care of patients. That’s why the SwipeSense team supports our customers through an intentional process to make consistent improvement more achievable, and put a process around how to share data in an impactful way.”

This systematic approach recognizes that technology implementation without behavior change support often leads to disappointing results. “We utilize our Hand Hygiene Acceleration Pathway to do two things,” Christine explains. “The first is to make the vast amounts of data collected by the SwipeSense system digestible and accessible. Each phase gives you a specific task and a correlating report to focus on to ensure you’re meeting the goals of the phase you’re in. The second is to create data transparency that empowers each staff member to be accountable for their own performance.”

As healthcare organizations continue to face new challenges and demands, the ability to effectively drive behavior change will remain a critical success factor. By applying these proven principles through structured approaches like the Hand Hygiene Acceleration Pathway, healthcare leaders can transform not just hand hygiene compliance, but create lasting improvements across their organization’s most important quality and safety initiatives.