The Behavioral Design Team (Nudge Unit) leverages insights from behavioral economics, implementation science, and human-centered design to partner with health system leadership, researchers, clinicians, and educators to develop, evaluate, and disseminate technological approaches to improve quality of care for all. The Nudge Unit is led by Safiya Richardson, MD, MPH, and is embedded in NYU Langone Health’s Medical Center IT and Institute for Excellence in Health Equity.

Our guiding principle is the assumption that everything matters.

Small and apparently insignificant details - particularly related to how choices and information are presented - have major impacts on human behavior. A nudge gently encourages patients and health professionals to make decisions that are in the best interest of the patient. We chiefly distinguish ourselves from other solutions for healthcare redesign by our focus on making doing what is right easier, and in the process reducing drivers of burnout.

The digital transformation of healthcare provides an unprecedented opportunity to influence human behavior.

Patients and healthcare professionals now make many of their choices in digital environments. This provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to influence these decisions using novel informatics solutions, including generative AI. We believe in the power of research and data driven approaches to solve seemingly intractable problems in healthcare.

Selected NIH Funded Projects

• EHR Nudges: Optimizing a Clinical Decision Support System for Evidence-Based Statin Medication Prescribing to Reduce the Risk of Cardiovascular Disease (R01HL171292)
• Nudging Provider Adoption of Clinical Decision Support: Implementation of an EHR-Agnostic Pulmonary Embolism Risk Prediction Tool (R01HL169364)

Selected Publications

• Richardson, Safiya, et al. "Effect of a behavioral nudge on adoption of an electronic health record-agnostic pulmonary embolism risk prediction tool: a pilot cluster nonrandomized controlled trial." JAMIA open3 (2024). DOI.
• Richardson, Safiya, et al. "Nudging Health Care Providers’ Adoption of Clinical Decision Support: Protocol for the User-Centered Development of a Behavioral Economics–Inspired Electronic Health Record Tool." JMIR Research Protocols1 (2023): e42653. DOI.
• Richardson, Safiya, et al. "A framework for digital health equity." NPJ digital medicine1 (2022): 119.
• Singh, Nina, et al. "Centering health equity in large language model deployment." PLOS Digital Health10 (2023): e0000367. DOI.

Members

Safiya Richardson, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor
Director

Nicole Redfern
Project Manager

Betty Cui
Data Analyst

Amelia Shunk
Research Data Associate