Centre for the Business and Economics of Health, The University of Queensland, Sir Llew Edwards Building, Level 5, St Lucia, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia.
Department of Sociology and Business Law, The University of Bologna, Strada Maggiore 45, 40126, Bologna, Italy.
Pharmacoeconomics. 2020 Dec;38(12):1289-1295. doi: 10.1007/s40273-020-00955-x.
There has been a rapid increase in the use of behavioural economics (BE) as a tool for policy makers to deploy, including in health-related applications. While this development has occurred over the past decade, health care systems have continued to struggle with escalating costs. We consider the potential role of BE for making improvements to health care system performance and the sustainability of publicly funded health care systems, in particular. We argue that the vast majority of applications in this field have been largely focussed on BE and public health, or the prevailing level of risks to health in populations, and with policy proposals to 'nudge' individual behaviour (e.g. in respect of dietary choices). Yet, improvements in population health may have little, if any, impact on the size, cost or efficiency of health care systems. Few applications of BE have focussed on the management, production, delivery or utilisation of health care services per se. The latter is our focus in this paper. We review the contributions on BE and health care and consider the potential for complementing the considerable work on BE and public health with a clear agenda for behavioural health care economics. This agenda should complement the work of conventional microeconomics in the health care sector.
行为经济学（BE）已被广泛应用于政策制定者的工具，包括在与健康相关的应用中。尽管这一发展是在过去十年中发生的，但医疗保健系统仍在努力应对成本不断上升的问题。我们考虑了 BE 在改善医疗保健系统绩效和公共资助医疗保健系统可持续性方面的潜在作用，特别是。我们认为，该领域的绝大多数应用主要集中在 BE 和公共卫生方面，或者集中在人群健康的普遍风险水平上，并提出了政策建议，以“推动”个人行为（例如在饮食选择方面）。然而，人口健康的改善可能对医疗保健系统的规模、成本或效率几乎没有影响。很少有 BE 的应用关注医疗保健服务的管理、生产、提供或利用本身。后者是我们本文的重点。我们回顾了关于 BE 和医疗保健的贡献，并考虑了通过明确的行为医疗保健经济学议程来补充 BE 和公共卫生方面的大量工作的潜力。该议程应补充医疗保健部门传统微观经济学的工作。
