Behavioral Economics in Healthcare Patient Adherence (Hospitals)

(Hospitals) A primary objective of the Health Sector Transformation Program is strengthening preventive care to combat the high burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Traditional lecture-based patient education has consistently failed to alter lifestyle behaviors, resulting in poor medication adherence, treatment abandonment, and financial strain from acute exacerbations. This interdisciplinary program integrates economics, behavioral psychology, and sociology to give primary-care leaders practical tools for changing patient behavior. Participants learn to design healthcare interventions and behavioral nudges that improve patient compliance with treatment protocols, grounded in an understanding of bounded rationality and the cognitive biases that drive real-world decisions. Public health officers, clinic managers, and family medicine leads explore how low-cost community interventions can maintain healthier population baselines, directly supporting the Keep Well pathway of the Saudi Model of Care. Through applied design workshops, leaders build, test, and evaluate nudge interventions tailored to Saudi cultural context, reducing the downstream cost of unmanaged chronic disease on capitated cluster budgets while improving long-term population health outcomes.