The future of healthcare is behavioural, with Georg Hirschi

We don’t have a knowledge problem in healthcare. We know what drives chronic disease. We understand the role of lifestyle factors. We’ve spent decades educating people on what “good” looks like. And yet outcomes continue to worsen.

That’s because the real challenge isn’t knowledge, it’s behaviour. As Georg Hirschi put it in our conversation:

“Performance is not accidental. It’s driven by good habits. It’s driven by good behaviours.”

That simple idea sits at the centre of one of healthcare’s biggest unsolved problems, turning what people know into what they consistently do.

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From awareness to action

Healthcare has traditionally focused on awareness. Food pyramids, guidelines, education campaigns, all designed to inform better choices. But awareness doesn’t guarantee action, particularly when decisions are driven by habit or made in the moment.

Georg described the shift he’s seeing in both individuals and organisations:

“The gap between knowing what is good for them and actually doing it was quite significant.”

That gap shows up everywhere. People know what healthy eating looks like, yet default to convenience. Employers invest in wellbeing, yet struggle to see lasting change. Insurers fund prevention, yet can’t always measure its impact.

The issue isn’t information. It’s execution.

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Why nutrition remains unsolved

If you want to understand the scale of the challenge, start with nutrition. More than 66% of Australian adults are overweight or obese, and that number continues to rise. The downstream impact is enormous, driving many of the system’s biggest cost pressures. Georg framed it clearly:

“Being overweight or obese… functions as the upstream risk multiplier for everything else.”

Despite this, nutrition has remained difficult to tackle. Unlike steps or sleep, it hasn’t benefited from passive tracking. It has required effort, manual logging, estimation, and ultimately discipline. Most people try once, then stop.

That’s why nutrition has become one of healthcare’s biggest levers, and one of its most persistent challenges.

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What’s changed

What makes this moment different is the technology.

For the first time, we’re seeing tools that reduce friction and enable real-time guidance. AI, computer vision, and behavioural science are coming together in a way that shifts digital health from tracking to influencing. Georg explained how this changes the experience:

“You just snap a picture of the food that’s in front of you… and then we overlay coaching, because that’s where the behavioural change happens.”

That combination matters. It’s not just about capturing data more easily, it’s about turning that data into action in the moment. Instead of logging meals retrospectively, users receive contextual guidance based on what they’ve eaten, what they’re trying to achieve, and what’s happening in their day.

It’s a move from passive insight to active decision support.

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Consistency over perfection

One of the most interesting insights from the conversation challenges a common assumption in digital health. It’s not accuracy that drives outcomes. It’s consistency. Georg put it bluntly:

“The accuracy isn’t the main driver of success. Consistency is.”

That has big implications. It means the best solution isn’t necessarily the most precise one, it’s the one people actually use. It also shifts the focus from building perfect data models to building engaging, habit-forming experiences.

The early weeks matter most. According to Georg, user success is largely determined by how consistently they engage in the first three weeks. That’s where behaviours start to change, and where long-term impact is set up.

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Why this matters for insurers and the system

For private health insurers and healthcare systems more broadly, this shift couldn’t come at a better time. Costs are rising. Chronic disease is increasing. The traditional model, intervening after something goes wrong, is becoming harder to sustain. Georg described the pressure clearly:

“Claims are rising faster than ever before… prevention becomes a P&L necessity.”

The challenge has always been that prevention is hard to scale and even harder to measure. Many existing initiatives are expensive, fragmented, and deliver unclear ROI.

What’s emerging now is a different model. Lower cost, scalable, and measurable, with the ability to influence behaviour continuously rather than episodically.

That creates a new opportunity for insurers. Instead of engaging members only at the point of claim, they can start to influence health earlier, with tools that generate real behavioural insight along the way.

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Prevention and clinical care working together

This isn’t about replacing clinical care. It’s about complementing it. Clinical interventions are essential, but they are often reactive and expensive. They step in once a condition has already developed. Digital, behaviour-led solutions operate further upstream. They aim to reduce the likelihood of those interventions being needed in the first place. As Georg put it:

“It’s not an either or… it has to be an and.”

The future lies in combining both approaches, with prevention shaping behaviour every day, and clinical care providing support when needed.

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What the next decade could look like

Looking ahead, the trajectory is clear. Healthcare is becoming more personalised, more proactive, and more embedded in daily life. AI is moving from analysing behaviour to guiding it. Georg described this shift as:

“AI becoming a helpful decision layer in daily life… helping people understand what to eat, when to eat, and why.”

We’re also seeing the early signs of more passive data collection, through wearables and other signals, reducing the effort required from users. Over time, this creates a continuous loop of behaviour, feedback, and improvement.

It’s a fundamentally different model to what we have today.

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Final thought

For all the complexity in healthcare, the core challenge is relatively simple. We need to help people make better decisions, more consistently, over long periods of time. That’s always been the goal. What’s changing now is our ability to actually do it. And if that shift continues, this move from awareness to behaviour may prove to be one of the most important innovations in the future of healthcare.

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