Fellowship in Healthy Choices

The University of Virginia's Darden-Data Science Collaboratory for Applied Data Science in Business (DCADS) is sponsoring a research fellowship to advance our understanding of why and how people in the United States make decisions related to their health, and how we can effectively, ethically, and safely influence those decisions in ways that benefit the individual, the health care system, and the nation.  

The health care system in the United States is expensive, with spending averaging more than $11,500 per capita and totaling 16.8 percent of GDP in 2019, exceeding the OECD averages of $4,087 and 8.8 percent, respectively. In addition, investment in medical and health research and development exceeded $194 billion in 2019, or about 1 percent of US GDP. Despite spending and investment that far exceed the rest of the world, life expectancy in the United States is 78.7 years at birth and ranks 26th of 37 OECD countries. While some Americans lack access to the care they need to be their healthiest, many have most or all of the tools that are required, including some of the best nurses, doctors, tests, and treatments in the world. The same is true of many other determinants of health. Many, but not all, Americans also have access to clean water and air, healthy food, sufficient shelter and protection from harm, and the opportunity to be active and social.  

So, why aren’t Americans the healthiest and longest lived in the world? And why isn’t the system of health care in the United States the model for all others? Among the factors that contribute to this underperformance is one that is both simple and complex – at once, easy to grasp and nearly impossible to understand. Americans are not the healthiest people in part for a very different reason – because we choose not to be. All too often, we choose to behave in ways that diminish our health or not to behave in ways that would improve it. These seemingly irrational behaviors are the focus of the DCADS Fellowship in Healthy Choices.

By understanding why individuals make these choices, how those decisions spread, and the ways we can influence them at a meaningfully large scale, this initiative will help to improve individual health and increase the business performance of the healthcare system, benefitting UVA, the Commonwealth, and the nation. 

Understanding the social, economic, and community determinants of health-related choices may allow prediction, detection, and targeted intervention to treat the kinds of acute emergencies or chronic health crises and disparities that threaten the well-being of individuals, the vibrancy of our communities, and the viability of our health care system.

The Fellowship in Healthy Choices is intended to support multidisciplinary research efforts by scholars and/or practitioners from a variety of disciplines, including data science, business, economics, psychology, public policy, and medicine focused on the problems and opportunities of decision-making in healthcare.

The work may cover topics such as data science methods for modeling health-related choice behavior, the diffusion of such decisions through families, communities, workplaces, and other social networks, and informational and other interventions enabled by contemporary digital technologies.  

Several representative examples of topics that are of interest are shown below. These examples may be incorporated in DCADS Fellowship proposals, but they are listed here primarily to serve as guidance. They are not intended to limit the scope or focus of proposed research in any way. 

Examples include: