Panel:
Testing the Effect of Pairing Behavioral Nudges and Innovative Health Information Technology Interventions
(Health)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
While health information technology (HIT) holds promise for helping to achieve the triple aim of improving the individual experience of care, improving population health, and reducing per capita costs of health care, there are many remaining open questions about how to best realize its full potential. For instance, what are ways to implement changes to HIT while minimizing patient and provider burden? How can patients and providers be encouraged to adopt and utilize new and innovative technologies? And do promising technologies like clinical decision support tools or sharing patient-generated health data actually change clinician or patient behavior in meaningful ways?
Despite continued government and private sector investments in HIT, significant barriers to its use remain. Rigorously testing new approaches to HIT that leverage insights from behavioral science can help ensure continued progress towards achieving the triple aim. The three papers that comprise this panel shed light on the effectiveness of different behaviorally-informed approaches to promoting and using HIT in different settings, targeting both patients and providers.
In the first two papers, behavioral scientists from the Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) in the U.S. General Services Administration present recent results from two projects which aim to increase patient-provider engagement through HIT. OES is an interdisciplinary team of experts within the Federal government that translates evidence-based insights into concrete recommendations for how to improve government and tests what works through the use of randomized control trials.
In the third paper, Laura Feeney presents results from a study conducted in partnership with Aurora Health Care to test the effect of a clinical decision support system on high-cost medical imaging orders.
Discussant Michael Ho (University of Colorado Denver) will focus on giving a provider’s perspective, where the VA is in adopting these behaviors, and future directions for health IT research. Discussant Vaishali Patel (Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology) will discuss national data on the behaviors targeted in the three research projects.
