De overheid als keuzearchitect? - Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het ...

de ov er heid a l s k eu z e a rchi t ec t
One of the problems people have in hospitals is what is called the
‘central line infection’. When a central line is inserted, there are
certain procedures that should be followed. If they are followed then
everything is fine, but if they are not followed then there can be an
infection. These infections kill people and cost tons of money. It has
been shown that if they follow a simple checklist in the operating
room, you can reduce these infection rates to zero. Interestingly, one
of the items on the checklist is that nurses are given permission to
remind the doctors to wash their hands. Hand washing is key. Covering
up the body except for where the line is going in, is another key.
Arming the nurses to remind the doctors to follow the rules, is one of
the things on the checklist. There is no excuse for any hospital not to
adopt these procedures, but many don’t.
18
Here is something that I have been pushing a lot since the book came
out. It sounds quite boring but I think is actually quite important.
The idea is to change the way we do disclosure. I still have to learn the
way it works here, but in the us if I get a credit card, I get 30 pages of
fine print telling me all the rules of that credit card, which I presume
no one has ever read. Now what we are suggesting is to supplement
that with an electronic disclosure. The way it would work is that once
a year you would get an email with a file with two types of information.
One is your usage data: it will tell how you have used that credit
card for the last year. The other would be essentially a spreadsheet of
all the ways that credit card can charge you for things. You could use
this for credit cards, for mortgages, for cell phones – it is a perfectly
general idea. Now it is not that we think any human would open
those files. But we think that in one click they are able to upload the
file to third-party websites, and that would help them shop and turn
humans into econs as shoppers. When we wrote this book, these
websites would emerge, they have already emerged.
Here is another example. There is a website in the us that is called
Billshrink.com. It helps people to find a good mobile calling plan.
You could use the same system for credit cards. One of the principles
that I stress is that we as consumers should have the right to our own
usage data. The suppliers have it, they know how many calls we have
made, how many text messages we have sent, how many emails.