Dr. Mitesh Patel on Nudging, Tech, and Health Care

High-quality health care depends heavily on high-quality decision-making. But far too often, this isn’t the reality of medical practice. How choices are framed in the context of healthcare delivery has received very little attention until very recently. This is why I wanted to sit down and talk with Mitesh Patel, MD, MBA.

Dr. Patel is the Director of the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit, the world’s first behavioral design team embedded within a health system. He is also the Associate Director at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, on faculty at the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation and the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, a Staff Physician at the Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia, and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

His research combines behavioral science with scalable technology platforms such as electronic health records and wearable devices to improve health and health care. He has led more than 25 clinical trials in partnership with health systems, insurers, employers, and community organizations, that testing interventions such as nudges, incentives, and gamification to change clinician and patient behavior. This work includes digital health interventions that use wearable devices and smartphones, and health system interventions using the electronic health record.

As an aspiring physician interested in the leveraging behavioral science to design and test approaches to steer medical decision-making toward higher value and improved patient outcomes, I was thrilled to interview Dr. Patel.