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Mission
The mission of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics Center for Health Incentives (LDI CHI) is to facilitate research that makes significant contributions to reducing the disease burden from major public health problems such as tobacco cessation, obesity, and medication non-adherence for cardiovascular and other diseases through better understanding of how to design and apply incentives and other behavioral economic approaches to improving health. The center has 3 primary missions:
- To advance knowledge about incentive design
- To develop and test scalable and cost-effective applications
- To work with private and public sector entitites such as large employers, insurers and health systems to improve health care delivery and the health of the population
Recent News
LDI CHI Faculty Member Rachel Werner receives Prestigious National Award for Research. Rachel Werner, MD, PhD, an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Core Investigator at the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion (CHERP), and staff physician at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center (PVAMC), received the Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award at the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting on June 28, 2009. This prestigious award recognizes scholars early in their careers as health services researchers who show exceptional promise for future contributions.
Enticing people towards healthier behaviors. LDI CHI faculty members Mark Pauly, Kevin Volpp and George Loewenstein describe studies they have conducted on financial incentives for smoking cessation, weight loss and medication adherence and the promises these approaches hold for modifying behavior and reducing health care spending (Knowledge@Wharton, June 24, 2009).
The Commonwealth Fund cites the collaborative efforts of LDI CHI researchers and General Electric in searching for scientific evidence that incentives to improve health behavior can be effective. Unlike prior studies evaluating smoking cessation that paid small financial incentives for smokers to quit, this large-scale study offered larger financial incentives and evaluated long-term smoking cessation rates. General Electric will be implementing an incentive-based program at its worksites similar to that employed by the study in anticipation that the company will save money in the long term due to increased productivity, lower absenteeism and lower health care costs (Purchasing High Performance Newsletter, June 18, 2009).
Employers and insurers are utilizing behavioral economics to motivate healthy changes. The use of incentives to increase people’s success in achieving smoking cessation, weight loss, medication adherence and completion of health risk assessments has been tested by LDI CHI researchers, and some of the new strategies are now being put into practice by employers and insurers (Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2009).
A new strategy to improve quality: Rewarding actions rather than measures. Rachel Werner, MD, PhD and a colleague from Rush University Medical Center argue in favor of providing incentives for actions taken to improve medical care quality and health, not simply changes in scores on poorly associated national quality measures, in a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association (medpagetoday, March 31, 2009).
Some cities and states are implementing legislation requiring restaurants to post calories on menu items, but more effective strategies are needed to tackle the obesity problem. According to George Loewenstein, PhD and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, part of the problem is that it is much easier to overeat than to eat well. Changes need to occur to make eating well easier and cheaper. When eating healthy is easier and eating unhealthy is harder, then people will choose the healthier foods (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 29, 2009).
A Slight Deficit Can Actually Be an Edge. LDI CHI affiliated faculty Devin Pope, PhD and a Wharton colleague analyzed data from NCAA basketball games and found that teams that were losing slightly at halftime won significantly more often than expected. Combining this result with laboratory evidence, they concluded that losing by a small amount in a competitive task may lead to increased motivation and a higher likelihood of success (New York Times, March 16, 2009).