Welcome to Duke MedEcon
Duke Medical Economics and Decision-making (MedEcon) was founded in 2020 by Duke medical students who noticed certain topics consistently stumped us and our classmates.
What’s the price of this medication for my patient? What options are there for patients struggling to afford treatment? How do providers help patients make difficult decisions about treatment options? How do patients make decisions about their diets, activity levels, or medication adherence?
We realized these questions are challenging because they fall way outside the scope of our anatomy, pathology, microbiology, and pharmacology classes. Instead, these questions were better answered by the field of healthcare economics – both the traditional economics that influence policies and costs, and the younger field of behavioral economics that provides insights on patient and provider decision-making.
Our goals are two-fold:
1. To share basic knowledge about healthcare costs and build practical skills useful for patient care
- Basic understanding of healthcare insurance, healthcare revenue cycle, charity care
- Going through the exercise of checking drug prices, finding costs of procedures
2. To explore research on the applications of behavioral economics in healthcare
- Discussing recent clinical trials of behavioral economics-driven interventions for improving medication adherence, physical activity, weight loss
- Exploring classic studies on systematic cognitive biases, discussing their impact on diagnostic thinking and clinical decisions
Overall, we hope this student group becomes a resource for medical trainees looking for answers to the practical healthcare economics questions, and a platform for sharing healthcare economics publications and research opportunities. Thanks for stopping by!
Our listserv is dukemedecon@duke.edu. For assistance with being added to the listserv, email Daniel Wang (dw325@duke.edu).
