Despite the wealth of technology-assisted advances in healthcare, human behavior continues to be the cause of great variance in health-related outcomes. Our health and well-being are vigorously affected by lifestyle factors such as physical activity, diet, or smoking as well as self-care activities like medication adherence and condition management. Recognizing these behavioral mediators of health outcomes suggests that we pay closer attention to patient experience and motivation. If we want to create the conditions under which people are most likely to initiate and sustain behaviors conducive to health and well-being, we need to better understand the dynamic nature of motivation and design experiences that support patient needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Just as no change is possible without action, no action is possible without motivation and as you’ll find in this talk, patient needs satisfaction and their quality (not quantity) of motivation are critical to the success of any behavior change intervention.