Community Talk with Loreen Wales

Transforming patient care through innovation

Loreen Wales’ professional journey is rooted in a lifelong fascination with how the human body functions at its best. Growing up with a nurse for a mother, she developed an early interest in health but knew she didn’t want to follow a traditional medical path. Instead, she chose to study nutrition, complemented by a degree in psychology and a minor in sociology, recognising the deep connection between physical health, emotional well-being and human behaviour.

From practitioner to innovator

Loreen’s career began in 1997 at the University of Alberta Hospital (Canada), specialising in nephrology. From the very beginning, she was confronted with the complexity of chronic disease care. When she introduced herself to a group of transplant patients in her first month, someone shouted, “I hate you.” It happened again the following month. Rather than becoming discouraged, Loreen called each patient to ask why. Their frustration was clear: they had received conflicting messages from different specialists and felt abandoned in managing their health. “That was the moment everything shifted for me,” she recalls. “I knew I couldn’t just hand out more information. I had to help build a system where patients actually felt supported.”

Over the next decade, she applied Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory of Self-Regulation to her work, helping patients connect their daily behaviours with how they felt physically and emotionally. She involved them in co-designing health experiments, creating a model that empowered them to take ownership of their health. Working with patients who often managed more than a dozen chronic conditions and multiple medications, she focused on simplifying care and building one cohesive story for each patient; “I wasn’t just treating disease,” she says. “I was helping people make sense of their health.”

A digital evolution in patient care

In 2006, Loreen founded Revive Wellness, one of the first private practice groups of dietitians in North America. Her goal was to prevent chronic disease before it progressed. She embedded the six pillars of lifestyle medicine - nutrition, physical activity, stress management, sleep, healthy relationships and substance use - into her practice from day one. Through this work, she identified a significant issue in healthcare.

While patients received information from providers, they did not get the personalised, ongoing support needed for lasting behavioural change. To address this issue, Loreen and her team developed My Viva Plan®, a clinical-grade digital health platform that provides personalised plans, tracks daily habits and builds patient self-efficacy, without increasing clinician workload. Unlike many wellness apps, it is a clinically validated tool designed to bridge the gap between the healthcare system and everyday life. “Technology shouldn’t replace care,” Loreen emphasises. “It should make it more human.”