9 - Behavioural Anomalies in the Healthcare Supply

Summary

This chapter examines the role of behavioural incentives as influencing healthcare delivery. It describes decision-making in clinical contexts and the roles of biases that naturally occur in these settings. Sometimes these have negative impacts (e.g., medical errors) and other times positive impacts (e.g., role of social norms for positive change). Pay for performance (P4P) programmes are discussed in this context. This chapter also includes examples of interventions such as defaults in the electronic health record and how antibiotic prescribing programmes that use social norms can be important to change behaviours. However, they need to be applied carefully and in concert with clinical collaboration.