Improving the uptake of performance reports via nudges

Host:

Dr Oliver Groene

OptiMedis AG

Burchardstrasse 7

20095 Hamburg

Germany

www.optimedis.com

Duration: 36 months

Background

This project will make an important contribution to the ongoing development and implementation of performance reports that are designed for providers with a view to stimulate performance improvement (Brehaut et al 2016). The results will lead to an important conceptual advancement of improving the use of health care performance data and to specific recommendations how nudges can be integrated into existing performance reports (Thaler & Sunstein 2008). This research project will examine the uptake of performance reports by healthcare providers via nudges applying a novel, cutting edge behavioural economics approach (Voyer B 2015).

Approach 

The PhD candidate will investigate the impact of a range of nudges for different performance domains (but with a focus on the clinical effectiveness domain) and on metrics that not only refer to composite outcomes, but to the distribution of such outcomes in a population (e.g. equity in access, utilisation and outcomes), a unique perspective widely disregarded by current performance reports. The PhD candidate will produce various performance report cards using the range of data sources available to OptiMedis AG and will design experiments that test how different nudges can foster innovation in clinical and health services management. 

Our research team

Our research and development and health data analytics teams work together to assess the performance of integrated care networks and identify improvement opportunities. We are a team of health services researchers, health economists, business intelligence & IT professionals and health communication experts. Our work focuses on designing quality indicators, analyzing large data sets of routine data from health insurance companies, developing process to extract and report on clinical data sources and use the knowledge to identify ways to improve health services. For more information, please see: http://optimedis.com/health-data-analytics

We are collaborating with the Hamburg Centre for Health Economics, a joint center of the University of Hamburg and the University Medical Center Eppendorf (UKE). A unique feature of the center is its interdisciplinary set-up as a result of the institutional integration of medical doctors and economists. Founded in 2010, with now 60 researchers, HCHE has already become one of the largest centres for health economic research in Europe. For more information, please see: https://www.hche.uni-hamburg.de/en/ueberuns.html

OptiMedis AG

Together with regional medical networks, OptiMedis AG is building an integrated healthcare structure in which doctors, therapists, hospitals, pharmacies and many other partners work in association and overcome past constraints. They coordinate treatment and can access all important information at a glance through the electronic network. Insured patients will be actively involved and motivated for early disease prevention and participation in health and care programs.

HealthPros is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network for Healthcare Performance Intelligence Professionals, running from January 2018 – 2022. HealthPros trains 13 PhD candidates (HealthPros fellows) into a first generation of Healthcare Performance Intelligence Professionals that can make effective use of available healthcare performance data in countries to improve integrated service delivery, patient engagement, equality in access to healthcare, health outcomes, and reduce waste in healthcare.

HealthPros ("Performance Intelligence Professionals") is designed to train international analysts that will be able to systematically link health data and strategic planning decisions. Through a new discipline of "Performance Intelligence in Health", HealthPros is expanding the breadth of human resources that can be employed by research institutions, private companies and government institutions, to turn health information into actions aimed at continuously improving health systems and services.

The training network brings together leading academics in the field of data science and health care performance assessment and improvement, as well as a wider immersion community, including stakeholders such as health insurance companies, national and regional agencies, multi-national consulting and pharma companies.

The HealthPros Training Network provides an innovative 3-years programme of collaborative, multidisciplinary and entrepreneurial training to the PhD candidates. Through innovative research, HealthPros is developing tools and implement methods to streamline healthcare performance measurement, the development and application of performance-based governance mechanisms and effective use of Healthcare Performance Intelligence by different end-users, that match the different health care systems in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, UK, Italy, Hungary and Canada, and will support the transferability of the tools and methods to other countries.

The Healthcare Performance Intelligence Training Network (HealthPros) aims to train a first generation of Healthcare Performance Intelligence Professionals that can make effective use of available healthcare performance data in countries to improve integrated service delivery, patient engagement, equality in access to healthcare, health outcomes, and reduce waste in healthcare.

The HealthPros fellows will obtain both the theoretical knowledge and practical experience at all levels of the healthcare performance intelligence pyramid, as depicted in the below figure. This pyramid is central to the overall structure of the Training Network (see also ‘Research’).

                                        Overview of the HealthPros Training Network structure

The specific objectives of HealthPros are to:

1. Deploy an Immersion Community-based approach to PhD training that consists of an innovative programme of collaborative, multi-disciplinary, and entrepreneurial PhD training. This approach secures interaction with key (multidisciplinary) stakeholders establishing a close link to the practice ensuring applicability of the results, and exposes Fellows in training to the myriad of career opportunities and give them the possibility to develop these opportunities during their training.
2. Develop Healthcare Performance Intelligence Professionals who will possess transferable skills relevant to the current research environment such as data handling, and interaction with stakeholders that enable them to be effective agents of healthcare system performance strengthening.
3. Develop new and evaluate existing tools and methods (such as performance frameworks, dashboards, logic models, advanced statistical methods and risk profiling) for measuring, interpreting and translating healthcare performance data into actionable healthcare performance knowledge and indicators and transfer them to healthcare governance mechanisms enabling performance based healthcare supporting the achievement of the Triple Aim (achieving a balance between improving the health of populations, delivering quality care for individuals, and containing costs).
4. Gain understanding of factors affecting utilisation of healthcare performance intelligence by end-users.