Erez Yoeli
Erez Yoeli is a research scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, where he directs the Applied Cooperation Team. His research focuses on altruism: understanding how it works and how to promote it. He collaborates with governments, nonprofits, and companies to apply these insights to address real-world challenges like increasing energy conservation, improving antibiotic adherence, reducing smoking in public places, and promoting philanthropy. Erez received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
What has your experience with Keheala been?
I've worked with Keheala since almost day one. Jon recognized that incorporating behavioral insights into Keheala could make it much more impactful. He also recognized that adherence and treatment completion are a public good--the individual benefits, but so does the community as a whole. He put two and two together: our team specializes in behavioral insights to motivate contributions to public goods, so he reached out, and we started collaborating.
Since then, we've worked at every turn, sorting out the platform's features and content, and working together to test it and publish the results of those tests. It's been very satisfying to work with a partner that really understands our mission and how it can add value in their space.
What can you share about Keheala's use of behavioral nudges in the healthcare space?
In my experience, when public health professionals seek to motivate behavior change, they usually focus on motivating the individual to better understand and incorporate the benefits of the behavior to themselves. TB treatment is hard now, as the logic goes. And the payoff is far down the road, so patients don't put enough weight on it.
Keheala is different. Our premise isn't that patients get it wrong, but rather that the individual motivation is the wrong motivation: that when patients are thinking just about themselves they are willing to take risks that they might not take if they recognized the costs these will have on others.
How does Keheala's use of behavioral nudges in the healthcare space compare to use in other sectors?
The techniques we incorporated into Keheala are pretty common in some sectors, such as philanthropy and resource conservation, where they've shown themselves to be surprisingly effective, practical, and not-too-burdensome from the standpoint of usability, logistics, and costs.
Where do you see Keheala in the future?
It'd be great to see Keheala adopted more broadly for TB treatment completion, of course, but I also think Keheala can be adapted for use in many other domains such as diagnosis, pre-treatment loss-to-follow-up, post-treatment engagement, as well other diseases (e.g., HIV, mental health).