Thira Woratanarat*

Assistant Professor, Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

*Corresponding Author: Thira Woratanarat, Assistant Professor, Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.

Received: May 28, 2018; Published: June 18, 2018

Citation: Thira Woratanarat. “Gearing Toward Healthier Behaviors and Increasing Patients’ Adherence by Applying Behavioral Economics into Clinical Setting”. Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 2.4 (2018).

  Every country in this world is facing with similar challenges, i.e., increasing trend in chronic diseases from unhealthy lifestyles as well as poor health outcomes due to inability to perform and/or negligence to physicians’ advice.

  Basically, in our daily life, humans has to make their own decision to do or not to do, from little to important things, around 2,500 - 10,000 times. Only 20 percent of those decisions has been accounted for knowledge or vidence-based judgment, whereas others have been driven by emotion, habits, and influences from contextual environment. That is why health education may not be adequate to maximize the occurrence of healthy behaviors and medical adherence of the patients. During the past decade, emerging researches pointed out the necessity to generate innovative measures beyond health education in order to counteract with those problems, not only for healthcare but also for prevention and control of common diseases especially non-communicable diseases (NCDs). One of the interesting ideas, at present, is the application of behavioral economics (BE) to better shape health behaviors and improve medical adherence in the patients. How can we do it? A good example about the effects of behavioral economics is a “Default option”. Some western countries like Austria and nearby that use opt-out policy in organ donation for their population, which increases the donation rate up to more than 90 percent comparing to those countries with conservative opt-in policy that obtain very low rate of organ donation.

Copyright: © 2018 Thira Woratanarat. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.