EAGER: Engineering Incentives for Health Care Systems

这笔赠款用于研究与卫生保健系统工程激励措施有关的基本研究问题，例如设计适当的激励措施、评估一套激励措施的全系统绩效以及预测参与者对给定激励措施的反应。我们特别关注如何通过调整非合作决策者的目标函数来利用激励来降低成本。将开发新的方法来计算大型分布式系统中的平衡。该项目将开发新的分布式迭代方法，使我们能够有效地将整个问题分解为每对相连参与者的一系列连续的双边均衡，然后迭代改进局部均衡，直到整个网络达到固定点。如果成功，这项研究的结果将增强对激励类型的理解，如何用激励来建模分布式系统，以及如何将激励用于战略决策者的大型系统。这项工作将为在复杂、分布式系统中设计激励措施的正式方法奠定基础，并定义从设计和工程角度研究卫生保健系统中激励措施和政策影响的研究议程。该项目中开发的新方法将进一步理解用于计算复杂决策者网络中的均衡的迭代算法。这项研究的主要社会影响将是使卫生保健政策制定者能够估计卫生保健系统中激励措施的总体成本和影响，并最终能够设计出能够导致理想的卫生保健提供的干预策略。拟议的工作还将促进多学科教育，促进将不同技术领域(分布式系统、经济学、最优化、卫生政策)的知识结合起来的能力，并将这些知识应用于了解和管理卫生保健系统。

This grant provides funding for the study of basic research issues related to engineering incentives in health care systems, such as design of appropriate incentives, estimation of system-wide performance for a set of incentives and predicting participant response to given incentives. We specifically focus on how incentives can be used to reduce costs by aligning objective functions of non-cooperative decision makers. New methods will be developed in order to compute equilibria in large distributed systems. This project will develop novel distributed, iterative methods that will allow us to efficiently decompose the overall problem into a series of sequential bilateral equilibria for each pair of connected players and then iteratively refine the local equilibria until a fixed point for the entire network is attained.If successful, the results of this research will enhance the understanding of types of incentives, how to model distributed systems with incentives, and how incentives should be used for large systems of strategic decision makers. This work will lay the foundation for a formal approach to engineering incentives in complex, distributed systems, and define a research agenda to study incentives and policy implications in health care systems from a design and engineering perspective. New methods developed in this project will further understanding of iterative algorithms used to compute equilibria in complex networks of decision makers. The primary societal impacts of this research will be to allow health care policy makers to estimate overall costs and impacts of incentives in health care systems, and eventually, be able to devise intervention strategies that will lead to desired provisioning of health care. The proposed work will also contribute multidisciplinary education, and promote the ability to combine knowledge in technically diverse fields (distributed systems, economics, optimization, health policy) and apply this knowledge in the context of understanding and managing health care systems.