Can TB patients help successfully identify others for testing?

How do you encourage patients to come in for TB screening in India? Maybe ask a friend, according to new research from Pradeep K. Chintagunta, Chicago Booth’s Joseph T. and Bernice S. Lewis Distinguished Professor of Marketing.

Chintagunta's research was recently featured in a policy note by the World Bank Group’s Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF), which supports and disseminates research evaluating the impact of development projects to help alleviate poverty.

The SIEF note reports on an experiment testing different outreach strategies for TB testing in India. It finds incentivizing patients was more successful in bringing in people for TB testing in India than health workers were.

According to the World Health Organization, TB killed some 1.6 million people in 2017, making it one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide and one of the leading causes of deaths from infectious disease. TB is treatable and patients are usually cured with a standard six-month course of medications.

Chintagunta, who sits on the faculty advisory council for the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation, focuses much of his research on how marketing practices can impact small businesses and entrepreneurial enterprises in emerging economies and how we can leverage marketing knowledge to improve health outcomes.

The goal of the SEIF is to collect and build empirical evidence that can help governments and development organizations design and implement the most appropriate and effective policies for better educational, health, and job opportunities for people in low and middle income countries.

To read the full policy note, click here »

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