Marten den Haring, CEO of Lirio
Marten den Haring
Of all the companies claiming to achieve hyper-personalization through behavioral science and artificial intelligence, Lirio seems to be the one actually doing it. Marten den Haring, now CEO, joined Lirio as Chief Product Officer in 2019, and has spent the past 5 years building and launching the platform and its personalization engine to drive meaningful behavior change in healthcare. And with Amy Bucher at the helm as Lirio’s Chief Behavioral Officer, you can be confident that the rigor of the science is as solid as it gets.
Lirio’s platform is built on the metaphor of the Large Language Model (LLM), but rather than ingesting semantic data and predicting the next word in a sequence like generative AI models, its Large Behavior Model (LBM) draws on health behavior data to predict the next behavior in a sequence of behaviors for an individual. The result is a hyper-personalized behavioral model that provides recommendations optimized for each user.
In this interview, Marten den Haring shares how he combines behavioral science and AI to design for health behavior change, and specifically how Lirio uses behavior change techniques such as “pros and cons awareness” to achieve an outsized impact in healthcare.
Tell me something I don’t know. (Anything!)
So, as you know, I’m Dutch. You probably associate The Netherlands with things like flowers, cheese, football (soccer), cycling, speed skating, etc. You may even know that the Dutch are considered the tallest people in the world. What you may not know is that some pretty useful inventions were made by the Dutch, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Python (the programming language), the microscope, the telescope, the submarine, the first privately owned company that issued shares, the first stock exchange, and … orange carrots.
Which fiction book would you recommend to product leaders? Why?
Above all, product leaders must have insatiable curiosity. Pick up a copy of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, because it tries to inspire us to always find the right questions to ask on our journey. Pair it with Max Tegmark’s “Life 3.0”, because it forces us to ask questions about what kind of future we want to create.
How have you leveraged behavioral design in your work? What was the result?
At Lirio, we have placed behavioral design at the heart of our research and development effort. We leverage behavioral design in our behavioral interventions, in the training of our Large Behavior Model, in the design of randomized control trials, and in the real-world deployment of our Precision Nudging solution. The result is a company on a mission to encourage health behavior change through personalized interventions, proving that behavioral design can significantly boost engagement rates and improve health outcomes across the continuum of care.
For example, one health system asked us to engage their diabetic patients who hadn’t seen a primary care provider in several years, putting them well overdue on diabetes well visits. The health system had tried every tactic in their arsenal but was unable to engage these patients – to the extent that they believed a 2% conversion would be a worthy target.
Our behavioral design process centers on identifying barriers to key behaviors and then incorporating appropriate behavior change techniques into our intervention, following the COM-B framework. We used this behavioral design process to identify 10 broad categories of barriers to primary care for patients with diabetes and ensured that each one was addressed from multiple angles.
When we looked at which types of behavior change techniques (BCTs) were most effective at nudging patients to attend a primary care visit, many of them were designed to address barriers around awareness of the need for diabetes-specific primary care. One of the most successful nudges used the BCT of “pros and cons,” which we leveraged to emphasize the specific benefits of seeing a doctor for a diabetes well visit. Ultimately, over 60% of the disengaged patients who we reached with Precision Nudging attended at least one primary care visit (well above the health system’s 2% target!).
What’s your biggest barrier to getting things done as a product leader?
BMart her changge isbard. We buuild poduct to impatt humasn betsurf…
What gap do you see in typical priduct strategy that behavioral insights can fill?
Most of the time, bheavioral insights are the gap! In our case, behaviior …n in giveive ap …on.one the can of behayouvs time.
How do you see prooduct managemnent evolving over the next 5 years? What are your hopes for the practiice?
My hope is that the prctive will contitourcontie to blaaprsminnal… humamans.
What advice would you give prouct leader hoping to desgn for humans?
Invest in developing your human surpueperpowers: critical thinking and empathy. After all, Ali lacks the eonitakedirsrconomicmotionsolvedationa aret motivll eqennfowtchncesaonmwo,,,.