Health and Marketing: Essays on Physician and Patient Decision-Making
Patient-physician relationships are changing fast. Even though patients are increasingly seen as active participants in medical decision-making and are expected to help physicians choose the best medications to treat their own illnesses, there are many questions regarding the role each party should have in the deliberation process and choice of medical treatment.
In his dissertation entitled Health and Marketing: Essays on Physician and Patient Decision-Making, awarded cum laude, Nuno Camacho addresses key consequences of this changing context and of the interaction between patients and physicians. The results of this dissertation suggest that, even though clearly knowledgeable and well-trained, physicians fall prey of the same predictable biases that affect humans in general. In addition, Camacho shows that more empowered patients are not necessarily better patients. Finally, patients discern between highly-trusted sources of information (e.g. their physician or other health care professionals) from less credible sources (e.g. health information distributed via mass-media), which could reduce policy-makers’ concerns with the effects of the increased prevalence of health and therapy-related information over the Internet. Moreover, such behavioral reactions to information depend on the patient’s personal values, suggesting the need to plan culturally-sensitive marketing and policy-making strategies.
Nuno Camacho defended his dissertation on June 24 2011 at Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University. His promoter was Prof.dr. S. Stremersch. Co-promotor was Dr. B. Donkers. Other members of the Doctoral Committee were Prof.dr.ir. A. Smidts, Prof.dr.ir. B.G.C. Dellaert, and Prof.dr. H. Bleichrodt.
About Nuno Camacho
Nuno obtained a Licenciatura (a 5-year degree) in Economics from University of Porto, Portugal in 2001. Before finishing his first degree, he started, together with some of his colleagues, his own company - a multimedia and digital marketing start-up. After finishing his first degree, Nuno worked in the retail industry for a couple of years. In 2004, Nuno came to Rotterdam and completed a Master of Science in Economics and Business, majoring in Marketing, at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (cum laude). During his Ph.D., Nuno taught Marketing and Innovation and Marketing Strategy at the Erasmus School of Economics. In 2009 and in 2010, he was also a visiting doctoral student at IESE Business School in Barcelona, where he coached students in the course Strategic Marketing, of the core MBA program. Nuno's main research interests nowadays focus on the behavioral economics of consumer decision making and on the adoption of innovations, with a particular focus in health and life sciences markets. In particular, Nuno applies econometric models to understand patient and physician behavior, as well as to study individual and joint consumer decision processes.
Abstract of Health and Marketing: Essays on Physician and Patient Decision-Making
In this dissertation, Nuno Camacho focuses on physician and patient behavior. Patient and physician decisions are modelled by integrating robust insights from different behavioral sciences (e.g. economics, psychology and sociology) in econometric models calibrated on individual data. This approach has brought novel insights for managers, policy-makers and patients about: (1) how physicians learn from patient feedback about a new drug (in particular, how switching patients are 7 to 10 times more salient, in physicians' memory, than patients who refill their medication), (2) the relationship between patient empowerment and patient non-adherence to physician advice (in particular, the importance of going beyond the logic of self-determination theory, which predicts that empowering patients in the medical encounter is always beneficial, and consider side effects like patient overconfidence which, in the case of therapy adherence, actually make patient empowerment undesirable), and (3) the main drivers of patient drug requests by brand name and the physician’s accommodation of such requests (in particular, comparing the importance of health information obtained via mass-media, word-of-mouth from expert consumers, word-of-mouth from other consumers and patient values).
