By LINDA T. HAND

Every day, we make thousands of choices. Some of them – even those that seem trivial at the time – will change the course of our lives. This concept was memorably illustrated in the 1998 film Sliding Doors, which imagined two very different paths for Gywneth Paltrow’s character, Helen, based entirely on whether or not she makes or misses the London Tube on her commute home—the film’s eponymous sliding doors. 

Helen doesn’t have the luxury of weighing her possible futures and altering her choices accordingly, perhaps quickening her pace or stopping for a latte along the way. Fortunately, for today’s healthcare decision-makers now facing their own Sliding Doors moment, the diverging paths of reactive versus proactive healthcare are much easier to contrast. 

Staying the course with reactive healthcare

To date, most health systems and insurers have had little choice but to stick with the familiar path of reactive healthcare. The status quo since medicine’s earliest days, reactive healthcare passively waits for people to get sick before “reacting” with all available measures to return them to health. As a result, patients wait longer to enter the system and arrive sicker, and end up receiving avoidable or more expensive care than if they had come to our attention earlier. And rising costs often serve as an additional deterrent to patients seeking care.