The limits of behavioural economics in medicine

In general, it work betters in public health than in more direct health care

Whenever I talk to physicians about outcomes that are worse than you’d expect, they are quick to point out that non-compliance — when a patient does not follow a course of treatment — is a major problem.

Sometimes prescriptions aren’t filled. Other times they are, but patients don’t take the drugs as prescribed. All of this can lead to more than 100,000 deaths a year.

A thorough review published in The New England Journal of Medicine about a decade ago estimated that up to two-thirds of medication-related hospital admissions in the US were because of non-compliance, at a cost of about $100