Regulating and nudging for improved societal impact of research-based knowledge in health care (The PINCH project)

This project is financed by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF18OC0033978)

The PINCH project focuses on a research question that is of the utmost importance for society: How do we ensure that the knowledge generated by large investments in research reaches end-users and generates societal impact in terms of improved health and increased productivity? In this production chain, the general practitioner (GP) is a crucial, but also a potentially weak link. The project uses economic theory, behavioral economics, psychology and public administration science to establish a theoretical basis for exploring how research-based knowledge implementation is driven by GPs’ personal characteristics, incentives, norms, and resource constraints. The PINCH project not only focuses on factors that are external to the GP, but also factors that are internal to the GP (e.g. their public sector motivation, intrinsic motivation, and user orientation), and explores interactions between these external and internal factors. A unique feature of the PINCH project is that three current natural experiments are exploited to verify the impact of policy instruments on implementation of new knowledge. We focus on the impact of monetary incentives, mandatory networking, and increased workload on the equitable and timely implementation of research-based knowledge, and the associated socio-economic implications.