Interview With Lirio’s CEO Marten Den Haring

Of all the businesses claiming to realize hyper-personalization by behavioral science and synthetic intelligence, Lirio appears to be the one really doing it. Marten den Haring, now CEO, joined Lirio as Chief Product Officer in 2019, and has spent the previous 5 years constructing and launching the platform and its personalization engine to drive significant habits change in healthcare. And with Amy Bucher on the helm as Lirio’s Chief Behavioral Officer, you might be assured that the rigor of the science is as strong because it will get.

Lirio’s platform is constructed on the metaphor of the Massive Language Mannequin (LLM), however moderately than ingesting semantic knowledge and predicting the following phrase in a sequence like generative AI fashions, its Massive Conduct Mannequin (LBM) attracts on well being habits knowledge to foretell the following habits in a sequence of behaviors for a person. The result’s a hyper-personalized behavioral mannequin that gives suggestions optimized for every person.

On this interview, Marten den Haring shares how he combines behavioral science and AI to design for well being habits change, and particularly how Lirio makes use of habits change strategies akin to “execs and cons consciousness” to realize an outsized impression in healthcare.

Inform me one thing I don’t know. (Something!)

So, as , I am Dutch. You in all probability affiliate The Netherlands with issues like flowers, cheese, soccer (soccer), biking, pace skating, and so forth. You could even know that the Dutch are thought-about the tallest folks on the earth. What you might not know is that some fairly helpful innovations have been made by the Dutch, together with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Python (the programming language), the microscope, the telescope, the submarine, the primary privately owned firm that issued shares, the primary inventory alternate, and … orange carrots.

Which fiction guide would you advocate to product leaders? Why?

Above all, product leaders should have insatiable curiosity. Decide up a duplicate of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Information To The Galaxy, as a result of it tries to encourage us to all the time discover the proper inquiries to ask on our journey. Pair it with Max Tegmark’s “Life 3.0”, as a result of it forces us to ask questions on what sort of future we wish to create.

How have you ever leveraged behavioral design in your work? What was the end result?

At Lirio, we have now positioned behavioral design on the coronary heart of our analysis and growth effort. We leverage behavioral design in our behavioral interventions, within the coaching of our Massive Conduct Mannequin, within the design of randomized management trials, and within the real-world deployment of our Precision Nudging answer. The result’s an organization on a mission to encourage well being habits change by customized interventions, proving that behavioral design can considerably increase engagement charges and enhance well being outcomes throughout the continuum of care.

For instance, one well being system requested us to have interaction their diabetic sufferers who hadn’t seen a major care supplier in a number of years, placing them effectively overdue on diabetes effectively visits. The well being system had tried each tactic of their arsenal however was unable to have interaction these sufferers – to the extent that they believed a 2% conversion could be a worthy goal.

Our behavioral design course of facilities on figuring out obstacles to key behaviors after which incorporating acceptable habits change strategies into our intervention, following the COM-B framework. We used this behavioral design course of to establish 10 broad classes of obstacles to major look after sufferers with diabetes and ensured that every one was addressed from a number of angles.

Once we checked out which forms of habits change strategies (BCTs) have been handiest at nudging sufferers to attend a major care go to, lots of them have been designed to handle obstacles round consciousness of the necessity for diabetes-specific major care. One of the crucial profitable nudges used the BCT of “execs and cons,” which we leveraged to emphasise the precise advantages of seeing a health care provider for a diabetes effectively go to. Finally, over 60% of the disengaged sufferers who we reached with Precision Nudging attended no less than one major care go to (effectively above the well being system’s 2% goal!).

What’s your greatest barrier to getting issues performed as a product chief?

Conduct change is tough. We’re speaking about influencing people that aren’t all the time motivated to do what is correct, or expertise obstacles to adopting wholesome behaviors. Extra importantly, people themselves change over time. Constructing product that leverages knowledge to digitally talk with folks to affect their choices and actions is complicated, requiring multi-disciplinary groups to collaborate, experiment, iterate and enhance the product. On this context, the largest barrier is creating an atmosphere the place we will rapidly entry and analyze suggestions knowledge to adapt to human habits in close to real-time.

What hole do you see in typical product technique that behavioral insights can fill?

More often than not, behavioral insights are the hole! In our case, behavioral insights allow us to transcend focusing on static inhabitants segments with a generalized method, to tackling habits change on the particular person degree with a personalised method. In different phrases, behavioral insights permit us to scale and goal the n of 1 throughout many behaviors over time.

How do you see product administration evolving over the following 5 years? What are your hopes for the apply?

My hope is that the apply will proceed to draw people who find themselves passionately interested by creating nice merchandise, and characterize the (numerous) populations they construct product for. The talents and instruments we use in our career will proceed to evolve. The scope and pace of our decision-making will proceed to extend. The inherent safety and privateness challenges that include a brand new technology of AI and data-driven merchandise will improve the dangers related to these choices. It’s due to this fact crucial for product organizations to turn into extra intentional about incorporating ethics and accountability into their analysis and growth processes and controls. As product leaders we mustn’t ever lose sight of the truth that our merchandise impression people, and know-how stays a method to an finish to higher serve humanity.

What recommendation would you give product leaders hoping to design for people?

Put money into creating your human superpowers: crucial considering and empathy. In spite of everything, AI (and tech extra broadly) lacks the emotional intelligence that people possess. Embrace behavioral design considering and use it to enrich your technical abilities and different subject material experience. Know what downside you might be fixing, who you might be fixing it for, and perceive the constraints of the info you might have entry to at any given cut-off date. Construct merchandise that study and adapt to vary, quick. Benefit from the expertise!

Marten den Haring, CEO of Lirio, is an AI entrepreneur keen about reworking well being care, and obsessive about digital applied sciences that reshape how we stay, work, and play. He obtained his MSc & Ph.D. in Economics from universities in Europe and has over 25 years of product growth and operations management expertise, delivering award-winning AI options for healthcare, monetary providers, legislation enforcement, and nationwide safety. He has participated in a number of profitable buy-side and sell-side M&A transactions for private and non-private know-how firms in the USA and Canada. Previous to Lirio, Marten was SVP, Platform at Ingredient AI, which was co-founded by Turing-award winner Dr. Yoshua Bengio. He additionally held government positions at Oracle, OpenText, and Digital Reasoning. In his present function at Lirio, he’s bettering folks’s well being behaviors and outcomes by Precision Nudging.