This article discusses peoples unwillingness to follow a course of treatment by physicians and the economic hit it takes on the medical industry. The article states that two-thirds of medication-related hospital admissions in the United States were because of noncompliance, costing about $100 billion every year. Not only is this an expensive fix, but more than 100,000 deaths a year come from noncompliance. When looking for a solution, researchers have began speculating behavioral economics, which did not prove to be very helpful. Another solution was to do a study using a "kitchen-sink approach". It involved direct financial incentives, social support nudges, health care system resources and significant clinical management. This proved to be quite unhelpful as well, as it failed. The research suggested that financial incentives tend to work better in public health than in more direct health care. The article then concludes that behavioral economics can offer interesting theories, but health and the healthcare system are both very complex, and maybe even too complex, with no single solution to the problem of patient noncompliance.
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6 comments:
I have never thought about this topic and the financial burden inflected on all, such as through taxes, for people that decide to be non compliant with physicians and health professionals. I am curious if this is an issue seen worldwide or if this is less of a problem in countries such as Sweden with a large amount of publicly funded social programs.
If I had to guess, I would say that it is less of a problem in Sweden just because it is so much smaller than the United States, therefore we automatically know that not nearly as much money is being wasted every year. I also think that because healthcare in Sweden is publicly funded, people are more conscious of wasting it. But that is just my theory I'd have to do more research to know Sweden's specific health care spending habits.
I kind of viewing this issue from the perspective of one of the market failure, in which the consumers are lack of the professional knowledge on medication to complex the industry of health care.
I agree with Hannah. I feel like in the example Sweden, more people have the incentive to go get medical help because they're spending taxes on it no matter whether or not they use it.
It's interesting to note how Behavioral Economics play into the Health Industry and affect outcomes of decision making. Psychologists can definitely use this as a tool to improve the situation of the health industry.
I think a lot of this can't be fixed by financial incentives, but could instead be fixed by better elder care - I would bet that a great deal of the non-compliance is from elderly people with complicated pill regimens or perhaps memory problems. A few pill companies have started to make individual pill packets for times of day rather than grouping pills by type (so one packet has your morning blood pressure/heart/arthritis medicine rather than one bottle having blood pressure, one having arthritis, etc), which I believe would be a huge step in the right direction. Paco Underhill's Why We Buy has a really excellent chapter on how medicine needs to be adapted for the elderly (for instance, removing the color yellow from packages, because it's a difficult color of the elderly to see) if anyone is further interested.
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