Probably the best thing about working in health care is that sometimes we get to have a significant, positive impact on people's wellbeing.
Many people aren't aware of how significantly financial incentives are leveraged in health care. They are used by employers to get members to take healthy steps like getting a cancer screening or an annual checkup. As many as 75% of employer wellness programs include some kind of incentive.
I had the privilege of co-authoring a peer-reviewed article on how employer incentives influence member health actions and we were recently published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. We wanted to understand the relationship between how the incentive program is designed and how much is offered to the member so we can better advise customers on how to structure their rewards. We found some really interesting answers to these questions.
The project started a couple of years ago when I wanted to enable our sales team to talk with customers about incentives in a way that added value rather than just pitched our rewards offerings. As a leader in the space it seemed like we should have enough data on how members actually use incentives to provide some meaningful insights.
The little project started, stopped, morphed, and ended up largely being driven by brains larger than mine (my co-authors). We had some meaningful findings that advance the field and hopefully help employers better design their incentive strategy to increase healthy outcomes.
Check out the article here!