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Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE)
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NIA Renews CHIBE’s Funding for Research to Improve the Lives of Older Adults

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CHIBE will once again join a cohort of top research centers in the Roybal Center program of the National Institute on Aging. The CHIBE team has received its fourth round of funding, this time providing $3.95 million over 5 years to translate and integrate basic behavioral and social research findings into interventions that improve the lives of older people. 

Why it matters:

The United States has the lowest life expectancy among peer countries despite higher health spending. The US health system emphasizes diagnosis and treatment over prevention, with 97% of health care dollars spent treating acute illness. To improve population health and reduce premature mortality, we need effective and cost-effective behavior change interventions, new ways to leverage existing health care system capabilities, and evidence-based approaches that can be turned into scaled programs and policies.

“Funding from the National Institute on Aging for our Roybal Center has been instrumental in providing us with both administrative core support and support for pilot projects that help us catalyze the path from initial concept to scaled implementation for our investigator teams,” noted CHIBE Director and Roybal Center MPI Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD. “We are grateful to be part of the NIA Roybal Center network and to have this support to continue this work to improve the health of middle aged and older Americans and to prevent premature aging of our population.”

“It’s exciting to bring both a long track record of impactful research as well as new directions in design, digital health, and machine learning to the Roybal family,” added CHIBE’s Behavioral Design Lead and Roybal Center MPI Alison Buttenheim, PhD, MBA. “We’re poised to make some breakthrough scientific discoveries and move the needle on scale, implementation, and policy impact.”

What we’ll do with the funding:

The goal of CHIBE’s Roybal Center is to increase the pace and reach of scientific discovery to deliver impactful behavioral economics interventions at scale.

To do this, the Center renewal features 3 priority areas:

  • Design thinking
    • One size doesn’t fit all with interventions. Design thinking with interventions means that CHIBE researchers can meet individuals’ needs and engage with them in customized ways.
  • Digital platforms
    • Digital platforms allow the team to test promising interventions in scalable ways while leveraging scarce intervention resources.
  • Dynamic adaptation
    • Dynamic adaptation lets the team “learn as we go” with real-time engagement and intervention responsiveness data.

The center’s team (which involves faculty from Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, School of Nursing, Wharton, and School of Arts and Sciences) will nurture early-stage pilots and plan to advance them to larger-scale field studies in collaboration with private and public sector implementation partners. Collaborating organizations will also help the center with implementation and dissemination of its work.

Drs. Buttenheim (Nursing/PSOM) and Volpp (PSOM/Wharton) are the MPIs for this renewal; M. Kit Delgado, MD, MS, (PSOM; Director, Penn Medicine Nudge Unit) and Hamsa Bastani, PhD, (Wharton; Co-Director, Wharton Health Care Analytics Lab) are the Co-PIs of the Pilot Core.

History of our funding:

CHIBE first earned funding for a Roybal Center in 2009, and it has been renewed every 5 years since then. CHIBE is proud to have been an NIA Roybal Center over the past 15 years.

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