Mitesh S. Patel is the Director of the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit, the world’s first behavioral design team embedded within a health system. He is the Ralph Muller Presidential Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Care Management at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School.
Patel is on faculty at the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation and the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, and a Staff Physician at the Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia, and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He is also the Director of the VA Advanced Fellowship Program in Health Services Research and Development in Philadelphia and Co-Director of the Wharton MBA Course on E-Health.
His research focuses on combining insights from behavioral economics with scalable technology platforms to improve health and health care. He has led more than 25 clinical trials in partnership with health systems, insurers, employers, and community organizations that tested ways to design nudges, incentives, and gamification to change clinician and patient behavior. This work includes digital health interventions using wearable devices and smartphones, and health system interventions using the electronic health record.
He has received several national research awards including the 2018 Outstanding Junior Investigator of the Year from SGIM, the 2018 Alice Hersh Emerging Leader Award from AcademyHealth, and the 2019 Young Physician-Scientist Award from ASCI. Dr. Patel’s work has been published in leading medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, and Health Affairs.
Patel holds an MS in Health Policy Research from the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, an MBA in Health Care Management from Wharton, as well as an MD and a BS from the University of Michigan.
