The BehavioralRx™ Toolkit: The 6-I’s of Community Belonging and Development

Healthcare organizations worldwide are seeking unique and interesting ways to increase patient engagement in their health programs offered, most of which are designed to improve remote care coordination, facilitate self-care management and sustain the health of their population. From rehabilitation facilities to treatment centers, support groups and wellness events, healthcare organizations worldwide are looking for the necessary tools to meet their program goals.

Utilizing our BehavioralRx™ methodology, GoMo Health has identified some of the key success factors to patient engagement.

The 6 I’s of Community Belonging and Development

Some critical success factors to patient engagement, such as social connectedness and readiness, are accomplished through the creation of a sense of community belonging.  By implementing the concept that active membership of a community has its privileges, GoMo Health has successfully used the 6 I’s to establish credibility, encourage participation, and develop sustainable community-based programs that allow patients to feel like members of their healthcare community instead of patients.

1. Introduction – Community members must be welcomed by receiving an orientation. By learning norms, values, and rules of the community, members are able to identify ways that they can become more active in the community.
2. Interaction – In order to form a bond between community members, opportunities must be provided for interpersonal bonding. Activities can be natural or intentionally planned, and they will foster new relationships and strengthen pre-existing ones.
3. Involvement – As members of the community recognize that they can have an impact on each other, they are encouraged to participate. Expectations for involvement and rewards for participation help to establish the cultural norms within the community.
4. Influence – Members of a community need to feel the impacts that they can contribute to that community. In order to feel valued within the community, they want to have control of, or input into, important matters.
5. Investment – Investment is the reflection of psychological ownership that comes from involvement and influence. Members of the community are now invested, seeing themselves as a community that is different from others.
6. Identity – By sharing a common purpose, or identity, community members begin to refer to themselves collectively (as “we” and “us”). Community members are able to clearly articulate what it is and what being a member means. The identity of the community is maintained and preserved. Community members are actively interested in recruiting new members.

The 6 I’s are just one of the tools in the BehavioralRx playbook, and the concept plays a large role in the community-based programs we develop at GoMo Health. To learn more about a GoMo Health program that successfully implements the 6 I’s of Community Belonging and Development, schedule a 1:1 consultation today.