Overview of Behavioral Economics

The BE framework uses insights from psychology, economics, and marketing to facilitate change in clinicians and patients to help them reach their long-term goals. BE recognizes that everyone has limits in terms of attention, memory, reasoning, and behavior. To overcome these challenges, BE proposes certain low-intensity environmental modifications designed to “nudge” people in a desired direction. BE strategies encourage change, but do not mandate it, thereby preserving individual freedom and choice. BE strategies have been featured through prominent outlets, such as the New England Journal of Medicine (Patel, et al., 2018), and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement annual conference (2018).

Examples of BE strategies include: (1) making the desired behavior as easy as possible to complete; (2) optimizing the framing of information (e.g., phrasing, timing) to decision makers; and (3) utilizing reminders. On the clinician side, BE strategies have been successfully applied to encourage physicians to become more judicious prescribers of opioids and antibiotics (Meeker, et al., 2016; Chiu, et al., 2018). On the patient side, BE strategies have also increased adolescent adherence to Type 1 diabetes regimens (Wong, et al., 2018). Given the success of BE for other populations, the HAT intervention utilized this framework to assist low-income pregnant adolescents.

How HAT Uses Behavioral Economics

Project Director Robyn Lutz talks about how behavioral economics principles are used in the program in this section of the training video.