John Kamensky

John Kamensky

John Kamensky

While their use in some agencies is in its infancy, other agencies have been using behavioral science approaches for years but only recently have their use been noticed more publicly. A good example is a five-year project in the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) to reduce injuries and improve the health of workers in the mining industry.

John Kamensky

A decade ago, IBM Center author Shelley Metzenbaum laid out a set of guiding principles for improving federal performance management that include the importance of communicate trends and targets, not just target attainment and ratings, and the need to encourage performance improvement with increased diagnostic analysis, data-driven discussion, and knowledge sharing.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently analyzed its antipsychotic drug prescription data for elderly patients and found some doctors were over prescribing these potent and costly drugs. It sent letters to high volume prescribers, telling them that their prescriptions were extremely high in comparison to other doctors in their state. Without taking any other action, CMS found that merely sending the comparison letters reduced prescriptions by 11 percent – thereby saving money and increasing patient safety.

Shortly before the massive downpour in the DC area a few days ago, my smartphone and iPad were pinging me with severe weather alert warnings. Were these just false alarms or should I really pay attention? I paid attention and – fortunately – sat tight and didn’t go out into the maelstrom.  But why did I decide to pay attention?  What made the difference?

The Clock Starts. NextGov reports: “As agencies push to meet multiple mandates to better use all the data they collect, the Office of Management and Budget offered some assistance Thursday with the release of guidance on implementing the first phase of the Evidence Act. . . .

The recently released, highly touted Federal Data Strategy Action Plan turns out to be a key building block for the newly-released implementation guidance for the Evidence Act. That the Federal Data Strategy is but a single (albeit important) building block within this guidance shows how the Office of Management and Budget is sending a message to agencies that it is out to fundamentally change how the government will operate in the future.

“Applying behavioral insights in the right context can lead to substantial improvements in program outcomes,” writes behavioral scientist Amira Choueiki Boland in a 2016 Public Administration Review article.

But just what are these insights -- derived from the academic field of behavioral science -- that can be applied in government?  It is hard to explain the field, in part because of its complexity, and in part because it wraps itself into a technical language that takes some decoding.