Building New Mental Models: Interview With RecoveryOne’s Chief Product Officer Miriam Beecham

Miriam Beecham, EVP and Chief Product Officer for RecoveryOne

Sometimes she feels a bit like Don Quixote fighting the windmill, Miriam Beecham tells me. “I have always wanted to change the dynamic between the health system and the patient, to put the power and the knowledge back in the hands of the consumer.” It’s no easy task, but Miriam leans on strategies from behavioral design to make a difference in her users’ lives.

She even talks like a behavioral scientist. She tells me, “everybody knows you should not smoke, and everybody knows that you should walk enough every day. But the difference between knowing it and doing it are two very different things.”

Miriam applied behavioral science at PwC with large government contracts like USAID and the Department of Defense, she worked with Pfizer to launch Chantix and its accompanying smoking cessation program, and at Healthwise she leveraged principles from cognitive behavioral therapy to help people live healthier lives.

Now at RecoveryOne, which she describes as a virtual physical therapy startup, Miriam helps her users re-imagine physical therapy, changing their mental models from a PT that requires hands-on assistance to one that can be done alone, in the comfort of patients’ homes. In this interview, Miriam shares how she leverages behavioral…