Description of Collaborative Activity: |
NIH and AHRQ under the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 made available funding for applications to study how the principles of behavioral economics could be used to enhance the results of comparative effectiveness research among health care providers in their practice. This NIH Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), supported by funds provided to the NIH and AHRQ under the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (“Recovery Act” or “ARRA”), Public Law 111-5, invites applications to study how the principles of behavioral economics could be used to enhance the uptake of the results of comparative effectiveness research (CER) among health care providers in their practice. (For this FOA, applications should be thought of as large pilot or preliminary studies rather than definitive trials.) This funding opportunity seeks applications that will investigate whether the principles of behavioral economics could be used to enhance the uptake of the results CER among health care providers and also enhance the maintenance of such treatments in patient populations. Research to foster the uptake of CER is seen to be necessary given the surprisingly modest behavioral response of health care providers and health care systems to information concerning treatments or procedures judged to be superior in CER trials. An additional possible benefit is that some behavioral economic interventions to promote the uptake of CER could be far more cost effective than other approaches including some pay for performance schemes (P4P). For the purposes of this FOA, the definition of comparative effectiveness research will adhere to that adopted by the Federal Coordinating Council given at http://www.hhs.gov/recovery/programs/cer/cerannualrpt.pdf. Behavioral economics refers to the interdisciplinary efforts involving cognitive and social psychologists, decision scientists, and other social scientists together with economists to model economic decision-making and consequent actions. The approach is inclusive, since at its heart it tries to take into account what is known about how people actually make behavioral decisions rather than relying on the assumption that economic agents are fundamentally rational in the sense of expected utility theory (see, e.g.,Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) work on Prospect Theory and Kahneman’s (2003) Nobel lecture). It is hoped that this line of research will lead to significantly greater understanding of the adoption of CER by health care providers and therefore enhance the quality of the nation’s health. Mechanism of Support. This FOA will use the ARRA-specific NIH mechanism RC4. |
NIH Participating Institutes/Centers/Office of the Director: |
NCI, NIA, NIDA, NIMH, NINDS, NINR |
