Informed Choice: helping patients make better decisions

Anna Dixon, Director of Policy at The King’s Fund. She has conducted research and published widely on health care funding and policy. She has given lectures on a range of topics including UK health system reform and patient choice. She was previously a lecturer in European Health Policy at the London School of Economics and was awarded the Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellowship in Health Care Policy in 2005–6. Anna has also worked in the Strategy Unit at the Department of Health, where she focused on a range of issues including choice, global health and public health.

Tammy Boyce is a freelance researcher and writer. At the time of writing the final report, she was the research fellow in public health at The King’s Fund. She also worked for the Marmot Review of Health Inequalities and at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism. She is the author of Health, risk and news: The MMR vaccine and the media and is co-editor of Climate Change and the Media. 

Barbara Fasolo is Lecturer in Decision Sciences at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is affiliated with LSE Health (Risk Research Unit) and the LSE Decision Capability Unit. Since 2009 she has a part-time secondment at the European Medicines Agency to study and aid drug regulators’ quantification of benefits, risks and their balance. Her area of expertise is behavioural science and experimental decision-making and she has studied decisions across a range of domains. She publishes and has given talks in areas of behavioural decision science as applied to policy-making, regulatory decision-making, decision analysis, financial and managerial decision-making.

Elena Reutskaja is assistant professor in the Marketing Department at IESE Business School. Professor Reutskaja’s research lies at the intersection of behavioural decision-making and marketing. She studies how people make decisions in their daily lives from choosing a snack to selecting a hospital for a treatment, focusing on the problem of too much information and choice overload. Professor Reutskaja is actively involved in a number of international research projects both for the private and public sectors. She was recently a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology, where she was engaged in brain-imaging and eye-tracking studies with applications in economics, business and policy-making.