Over the past few months we’ve had the pleasure of meeting with Grace Soyao and Bob Waite of Self Care Catalysts to learn about each other’s products and services.  The overall goal of these meetings is to establish linkages that can benefit each of our companies, but also to provide advantages for future clients and partnerships. Self Care Catalysts identify themselves as a “non-traditional health research, strategy, and solutions company” who use an integrated approach to provide a framework for understanding the complexity of patient decision-making.  Using principles of health psychology, Self Care Catalysts focus on gaining insights to the patient journey and identifying Decision Conflicts™ around health management.  Decision conflicts represent struggles that patients encounter when faced with uncertainty about their treatment and/or outcomes.  Of note, comprehensive understanding of decision conflicts involves focusing not only on factors that overtly affect decision-making, but also subtle considerations that affect patients’ decision-making such as effects on patients’ quality of life and weighing short-term gains vs. long-term losses.  The purpose of these strategic solutions is to inform (and ultimately enhance) behaviour change, whether it be patient adherence or patient-physician conversations. We are particularly impressed with Self Care Catalysts’ method of generating their solutions since they integrate both qualitative and quantitative methodologies.  These include one-one-one interviews with patients to gather specific examples and ‘stories’ of how patients deal with their illness in addition to data from questionnaires and/or diaries collected over time. We believe that Self Care Catalysts is a company with a wealth of creativity and potential.  At MEMOTEXT, one of our primary aims is “to create the most intelligent, user friendly, lifestyle appropriate interventions for patients” using programs that are targeted and relevant to both the specific disease/disorder and to the individual.  It is clear then that working with Self Care Catalysts could be a mutually-beneficial partnership:  Self Care Catalysts can provide strategic solutions for future adherence programs targeted to specific patient populations while MEMOTEXT can provide the options for realizing these well-designed solutions in a scalable, cost-effective manner. We’d like to thank Self Care Catalysts for the opportunity to work together and are excited to move forward on possible collaborative projects.