CHIBE in the News

Source: Freakonomics Blog, October 17, 2011 Research by CHIBE’s Jonah Berger and his colleague Devin Pope found that players who thought they were losing slightly halfway through a competitive game played in a lab setting were more likely to eventually win the game. This finding aligned with the researchers’ data from 60,000 collegiate and NBA basketball games, which showed that teams that were down by one point at halftime were more likely to win than teams that were ahead by one point at the half.

Source: Virginia Pilot Online, October 16, 2011 Mark Pauly, in an article about the relative lack of health insurance among high-earning residents of Norfolk, Connecticut, offered that these people may be young and healthy, “grasshoppers.” Alternatively, perhaps, the data reflect people without health insurance who happen to live with a high earning person.

Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 28, 2011 In 2014, healthcare reforms will provide millions of new patients with insurance through Medicaid, yet obstacles to medical care will likely remain. Pilot research conducted in Northeast Philadelphia by UPHS Center for Innovation in Health Care Financing Member David Grande revealed a dearth of medical care available, with only 14 percent of medical practices in the study area having room for new patients insured by Medicaid. In addition, available data make it difficult to determine where physicians practice, a key point of information in allocating health care resources.

Sources: Penn Medicine Press Release, August 18, 2011; The Daily Pennsylvanian, September 19, 2011; University of Pennsylvania Almanac, November 1, 2011 The University of Pennsylvania Health System Center for Innovation in Health Care Financing is a joint project between the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics at the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics and the University of Pennsylvania Health System. The UPHS Center tests and implements behavioral economic approaches to patient, provider, and employee health, healthcare delivery, and wellness. For more information see the UPHS Center web page.

A team of investigators from LDI CHIBE (Asch and Volpp, Mult PIs) competed successfully for a two year Grand Opportunity award from the National Institute on Aging that will be pivotal to building CHIBE’s research infrastructure.  The project, “Developing Interactive Technologies to Improve Research and Health Behavior,” will support Center investigators in designing, building, testing and refining an IT platform that will: 1) provide investigators an easily customized web-based platform to test behavioral interventions to promote health, including the use of financial incentives, frequent feedback, visual approaches to information, and social networks; 2) provide older Americans, other members of the general public,…