Why Trow Health?

Trow Health helps partners understand why people respond differently to efforts intended to improve their health and turn that understanding into practical approaches for better health outcomes.

Health programs often rely on a reasonable foundation: accurate information, convenient access to care, supportive technology, social support, and appropriate incentives.

These foundations matter.

Yet even well-designed programs can fall short of their health goals. Program leaders often know that people respond to health promotion campaigns differently. The harder questions are: Why? What to do differently?

Trow Health starts with those questions.

1. The Goal: Better Health

Patient engagement, health promotion program participation, and healthcare utilization are important, but they are not the ultimate objective.

The goal is better health for the populations we manage.

For those responsible for improving a population's health, that means helping more people benefit from health information, preventive care, treatment, and support services that can improve their lives.

2. The Challenge: People Respond Differently

As humans, our beliefs strongly influence our health decisions, for better or worse.

We interpret health information and recommendations through our beliefs, trust, prior experiences, motivations, perceived health risk, perceived healthcare efficacy, identity, social norms, practical circumstances, and the information environments around us.

Those beliefs vary within populations.

Some of us underestimate our health risks, while others are more concerned than our objective risk may warrant. We differ in whether we seek or avoid health information, how we interpret what we encounter, whom we trust, and whether we believe acting will help.

An individual’s beliefs and trust in the information, care options, or support services can lead to very different decisions, forming belief subpopulations.

For organizations responsible for health programs, this creates a difficult operational challenge. Preventive care may be available but not used. Strong evidence may still leave people uncertain or unconvinced. Treatment and support may be readily available, yet some people may question whether it will help, or they struggle to take the first step.

3. Our Approach: Start With How People Think About Health

This is where psychographics can add an important perspective.

Psychographics examine the beliefs, attitudes, motivations, values, and perceptions that shape decision-making. Trow Health uses these differences to identify groups that approach health decisions differently, then adds sociodemographic and contextual information to better understand those groups and how to engage them.

This approach does not diminish the importance of demographics, socioeconomic conditions, access, environment, culture, or other determinants of health. Those factors can tell us a great deal about who experiences different risks and outcomes.

Psychographics can add another question:

Can we identify groups that have similar thoughts about their health risks and the actions available to them?

That distinction can help turn differences within a population into actionable communication and engagement approaches.

Better health engagement does not necessarily require knowing more about each individual's health information. Understanding patterns in beliefs, perceptions, and information behaviors across groups may be sufficient to help organizations design more relevant approaches while respecting individual privacy.

4. The Evidence Challenge: Useful Answers Cross Disciplines

Health research has generated extensive evidence on risk perception, trust, efficacy, information seeking, and other influences on behavior, but research often does not ask how the evidence applies to different psychographic groups.

The Marketing domain has a long history of audience and psychographic segmentation in its persuasive communication, but only a subset is relevant to health. Psychology, behavioral science, communication, public health, neuroscience, technology, and other disciplines contribute additional evidence about how people process information and make decisions.

As a result, potentially useful findings can remain separated by different terminology, theories, methods, and research traditions.

Trow Health works across these boundaries.

Trow connects evidence that might otherwise remain separated, identifies empirically supported approaches that may translate into practice, and helps partners determine what existing research can already tell them.

This interdisciplinary perspective also matters as organizations explore AI and other technologies. Effective health applications may depend on behavioral and communication evidence that sits well outside the disciplines designing the systems.

5. From Evidence to Action and Back Again

Trow Health does not begin with a fixed product or prepackaged solution.

When useful evidence exists, Trow helps translate it into practical approaches that can be adapted, tested, evaluated, and improved.

When important questions remain unanswered, Trow helps define the problem, identify missing evidence, bring together appropriate expertise, and collaborate on ethical, testable approaches to learn what works.

That may involve employers seeking better workforce health engagement, providers or health plans trying to reach different populations, technology teams developing AI-enabled health systems, or researchers and funders seeking to translate behavioral evidence into practice.

Trow Health works in the gap between evidence and action.

Our goal is to help partners understand why people respond differently, what existing evidence can tell us, and what is worth trying next.