Multidisciplinary Program on Disease Management: Drug Resistance and Social Norms
This program addresses aspects of the role of the social context in the management of disease, through two related projects: (1) challenges in drug resistance management; (2) the role of social norms in health care. Incentives and norms are important for determining how infection and drug resistance externalities are addressed in health care. Our overarching goal is to see how incentives and norms interact in the context of clinical practice.
We will examine drug resistance management within the broader context of common-property problems in infectious disease. Progress in creating policy solutions for dealing with drug resistance will depend on better understanding of the ecology of resistance as well as incentives for patients, physicians and health care facilities to make better use of antibiotics. In examining the role of social norms in health care, the challenges lie in bringing evidence to bear on how norms are formed, enforced and transmitted. We will initially focus on the specific example of the effect of medical training on norms that determine clinical practice (such as the selection and duration of antibiotic therapy, the choice of infection control procedures, administration of lytic therapy for thrombotic stroke and the indication for cesarean section). These norms are then transmitted to other institutions where their likelihood of adoption depends on achieving a critical mass of incoming physicians trained under a different practice environment.
PIs
