Penn Medicine Nudge Unit

Launched with support from CHIBE and the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Transformation and Innovation, the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit is the world’s first behavioral design team embedded within the operations of a health system. The team, which is led by CHIBE Associate Director Dr. M. Kit Delgado, leverages insights from behavioral economics and psychology to design and test approaches to steer medical decision-making and daily health behaviors toward higher value and improved patient outcomes. Since launching in 2016, the team has worked on more than 100 projects including nudging clinicians and patients, predicting decision-making and health behaviors, and behavioral phenotyping. Many of these projects have been scaled either throughout Penn Medicine or implemented in other health systems. The Nudge Unit’s work has been published in leading medical journals including NEJM, JAMA, and the Annals of Internal Medicine. It has also been featured in a wide range of media outlets including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Harvard Business Review, and Freakonomics.