Much of a person’s health is shaped by everyday choices about sleep, food, movement and stress that happen outside hospitals and clinics, and Dallas-based Baylor Scott & White Health is working with Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global to support patients in those moments between appointments.
Through the collaboration, content from Thrive, a behavior change technology company, will be built into the system’s MyBSWHealth digital platform, a Baylor Scott & White spokesperson told Becker’s. The system called the effort an industry first. Thrive is known for its “Microsteps,” which are small science-backed daily habits tied to sleep, movement, nutrition, stress management and connection, and Baylor Scott & White plans to incorporate them over time.
The effort is the latest step in Baylor Scott & White’s access redesign and its broader push to become a daily health partner for patients, work the system says is already yielding results. Since fiscal 2024, preventive care outreach through MyBSWHealth has led to nearly 318,000 completed appointments, such as mammograms and colonoscopies, and uncovered more than 93,000 new conditions in patients.
In fiscal 2026, virtual care grew 20% to more than 570,000 encounters, accounting for 7.55% of all system encounters, and virtual visits are available around the clock to all Texans, not only Baylor Scott & White patients. Proxy access, which lets patients give a family member or caregiver access to help manage their care, grew 20.6% during the same period, and the system is also testing how to integrate wearable data into the app.
For CEO Pete McCanna, the push to reach patients between appointments is personal. His father, who had Parkinson’s disease, was sent home with multiple prescriptions and no instructions, Mr. McCanna wrote in a 2025 blog post. He told Becker’s that year that his father “had good technical care, but every other aspect that he needed was incredibly difficult.”
That focus on what happens outside the system’s walls carries into the Thrive collaboration. “Our customers’ health is shaped by thousands of daily health and well-being decisions made outside the walls of our clinics and hospitals in between medical appointments,” Mr. McCanna said in a statement shared with Becker’s.
Ms. Huffington, who founded Thrive in 2016, said the collaboration combines clinical expertise with behavior change science “to help people turn healthy intentions into sustainable habits.”
The collaboration launches this week at Baylor Scott & White, the largest nonprofit health system in Texas, which serves more than 3 million customers through 55 hospitals.
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