Progress Report for Applying Behavioral Economics to Perplexing Problems in Health and Health Care

Source: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, April 22, 2014 The RWJF funded “Applying Behavioral Economics to Perplexing Problems in Health and Health Care” Initiative, administered by CHIBE, funded a series of grants to drastically improve the delivery of health care and the promotion of health. The program received almost 600 applications for the first and second round and ultimately funded 14 grants in total. Results from the first round have been encouraging, notes Kevin Volpp. “Clearly behavioral economics approaches have a lot of potential to contribute to health care,” he said. “At the same time it’s also true that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to figure out how those approaches can optimally contribute to health care and why some approaches that may be conceptually appealing are not successful, or only modestly successful, when deployed in field settings.”