About, The Anticipation Habit

About The Anticipation Habit

If you’re here because you want to see better communication and collaboration in healthcare – welcome – and I like you already. I’m Karen Knops, M.D. Thanks for finding me.

The goal of this site is to provide free resources for people trying to make healthcare better. That starts with better conversations at the bedside, in the boardroom, and wherever decisions are made. Good conversations transform inspiration into action: creating partnerships between patients and clinicians, reducing burnout, addressing healthcare disparities, changing the world for the better. Bad conversations waste time and energy, create disengagement and sabotage our best efforts.

So I’m leveraging what I’ve learned. As a teenager with severe scoliosis, I spent years seeing doctors. The challenges of speaking up in the exam room, of adapting to life as a teenager wearing a brace 24/7, and making life-altering decisions about surgery taught me much about the impact of illness and the healthcare system itself. My perspective as a patient made me realize that if ever became a physician, my focus would be on creating a culture of collaboration in medicine.

In my leadership roles, I’ve seen efforts to improve healthcare culture and communication – workshops, “train-the-trainer” programs – are often too complicated to spread easily. Spending time and money on training feels like taking action, but changing behavior requires more. Effort doesn’t change behavior. Systems do.

This site offers a system for connecting clinicians and patients. We hope you’ll see that smart behavioral design improves the work environment and amplifies the mindfulness and resilience of the people in it. It changes habits- the first step to changing culture.

Collaboration between patients and the people who care for them has never been so important. Recent events have applied pressure to the point of breaking much of what healthcare used to be, but perhaps, to paraphrase songwriter Leonard Cohen, those cracks can be where the light gets in. The choice is ours.

Who We Work With

We work with patient advocacy organizations, medical educators, coaches, and training organizations. We provide guidance for how to leverage the tools on this site to make lasting change. Consultation, tailored education, and other collaborations are our passion.