Authors

Marcelo Corrales is Attorney-at-Law specializing in intellectual property, information technology and corporate law. His research interests are the legal issues involved in disruptive innovation technologies and biomedicine.
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Nudges or Shoves in the Secondary Use of Health Data: What is the More Desirable Approach? (Part 2)

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By Marcelo Corrales Compagnucci, Janos Meszaros & Timo Minssen

This post is the second part in a two-part series about nudge theory, health data, and the U.K.’s National Data Opt-out System. You can read the first part here. 

Governments are always actively trying to improve their health care systems, and the secondary use of health data is one way of reaching this goal effectively. The secondary use of health data involves the use of health care data collected for a new purpose, such as research and policy planning. This data is usually collected from hospitals and health care systems – large databases containing administrative, medical, health care, and personal data from patients.

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Nudges or Shoves in the Secondary Use of Health Data: What is the More Desirable Approach? (Part I)

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By Marcelo Corrales Compagnucci, Janos Meszaros & Timo Minssen

Empirical studies in behavioral economics have demonstrated how people are biased and often make poor decisions against their best interests. This has led policy makers to promote choice-preserving approaches, a.k.a. nudges. However, there has also been an increasingly vocal group of legal scholars who are interest in asking whether mandates and bans can be more effective than nudges. As pointed out by Cass R. Sunstein and others, the rationale behind this question is very simple: If we know that people make mistakes, why should we insist on adopting approaches that preserve freedom of choice?

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