Duke 2008 | ASHE | Equity and Efficiency in Health and Healthcare

Understanding how patients and providers process new medical information, and how they respond to financial information, is becoming increasingly important in today's policy context. Programs like Medicare are considering pay for performance methods of reimbursement to change the prevailing financial incentives, and consumers are exposed increasing amounts of medical information because of the consumer directed health care movement and because of increased recent attention to FDA warning about prescription drugs. In our session, we explore the impact of a few specific interventions that increase incentives and information in health care today: providing warning labels on drugs, performance-based compensation, and financial incentives doctors face when prescribing drugs.

Two of the papers examine the response to warning labels and contribute to the broader topic of how patients and physicians respond to new information. This topic is growing in importance as the amount of information about health care continues to increase (i.e. medical research, direct-to-consumer advertising, medical report cards, etc). These papers also provide insight into whether the response to new information is occurring at the doctor or patient level. This has important implications for public health officials deciding who to target when trying to disseminate new information. In fact, the ability to translate research into better health depends on the ability to get the new information into the right hands.

Two of the papers also look at how financial incentives affect the types of amount of treatments that doctors provide. What makes this particularly relevant to the topic of new information in health care is that the impact of the new information will be hampered if the financial incentives doctors face are out of line with the practices proscribed by the new information.