Her online programs help people manage their health

BEST BEHAVIOR: Janice M. Prochaska, Pro-Change Behavior System Inc. president and CEO, founded the company in the late 1990s and now oversees a staff of 20 people, many of whom are URI psychology department graduates. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD
BEST BEHAVIOR: Janice M. Prochaska, Pro-Change Behavior System Inc. president and CEO, founded the company in the late 1990s and now oversees a staff of 20 people, many of whom are URI psychology department graduates. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD

Over the last 10 years health-insurance companies have stressed the need for preventative health care and wellness programs. Well ahead of the curve in establishing these programs and evaluating their effectiveness are Janice M. Prochaska and her company, Pro-Change Behavior Systems Inc. of South Kingstown.
Since 1997, Prochaska has been on the cutting edge of changing people’s behavior to help improve their health and well-being.
Her goal is simple, to offer evidence-based, behavior-change solutions to health care problems. To do so, the company conducts scientific research to produce effective solutions. The company was founded by her husband, James O. Prochaska, who now serves as a consultant and is still the head of the cancer-prevention research center at the University of Rhode Island. Prochaska is president and CEO and the company is a certified woman’s business enterprise.
She holds an adjunct faculty position at URI, earned a master’s in social work from Wayne State University and a Ph.D. in social work administration and policy from Boston College. She has also published more than 100 papers on the transtheoretical model and behavior change and social work.
Pro-Change Behavior Systems Inc. began when it received funding in the late 1990s from Electronic Data Systems, an information technology equipment and services company headed by H. Ross Perot. The money was to help apply the “transtheoretical model,” a behavioral change-management program based on “stages of change” and processing feedback at each step. With Prochaska having completed her dissertation on the subject, the fit was perfect. “That helped us with gathering funding from the outside,” she said. Soon thereafter the company signed two contracts for health-behavior change for illnesses such as diabetes and weight. “At the same time we also learned about Small Business Innovation Research grants from the National Institute of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Protection,” she said. “We were fortunate to get fast-tracked and receive a Phase I and II grant early in our formation. That helped establish us for funding.”
It hasn’t been easy. The NIH sets aside a certain amount of funding for small business and with each passing year the process becomes increasingly competitive.
The company’s first grant was to investigate stress management, so Pro-Change conducted numerous end-user interviews to discover what people needed to manage stress and if some treatments were better than others. Pro-Change then builds online programs to manage stress, stop smoking, lose weight and for other health-related issues.
“We test the programs in randomized clinical trials to see if they’re effective,” she said. If they are, they are licensed to wellness partners that disseminate the programs to a variety of end users,” she said. Pro-Change programs have been used across the country and as far away as Canada, New Zealand and Japan.
“They are behavior-based programs that help people [avoid] chronic diseases. They have also been used by people with chronic diseases to have a better quality of life,” she said.
Pro-Change employs 20 people, many of whom are University of Rhode Island graduates, primarily from the psychology department. “It was in the psychology department at URI where this transtheoretical model, this behavior-change theory, was researched and developed,” she said.
In May they outgrew their office space and moved to their new location at 1174 Kingstown Road in the Palisades Mill in South Kingstown. Despite a tentative economy, the company has received seven SBIR grants in the last five years. It has been able to keep a stable revenue stream and so far has avoided laying off employees – all a credit to Prochaska’s leadership.
She is also a trendsetter. “We are a subcontractor right now … [helping] to adapt our programs for intellectually disabled people. That’s a new area we will be working on in the next year or two as part of a subcontract for a larger grant that was given to the stat.”
Looking to the future she sees an increasing need for their services. “We think because of the primary medical-care home that there is more pressure on family practices and primary-care physicians to do more prevention, and we hope our program will be used more in that arena as well,” she said.
Because their research and models focus on how to change behavior, it can be applied to more than health care. This year Prochaska and her staff landed two grants.
One is to explore alternatives for responsible drinking for adult populations, where they would develop a program for their lifestyle suite of services such as weight and smoking.
“The second is for a juvenile-justice environment, working with children on probation to help them stay out of trouble with the law,” she said. “The model can also be applied to violence prevention for teens, which is something that we have developed,” she said. “We have also applied [the model] to bullying prevention [that] is being used in Cleveland.”
Most behavioral programs begin with a disclaimer that it will be ineffective if the subject isn’t ready to quit. No so in the case of stages of change.
“The program is designed for a specific need and because it is online the subject can watch it anywhere. All we ask is that they watch it,” she said. •

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