News Archive
Employers are increasingly offering incentive-based approaches to improve the health of their workers says LDI CHI Director Kevin Volpp. He highlighted that careful assessment of the degree to which such approaches have a lasting impact on health is needed and encouraged employers to track their results carefully (USA Today, January 20, 2009; Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2009)
Why all-inclusive vacations pay off. The brain’s pain centers are activated when a person needs to pay each thing by itself. George Loewenstein, PhD says that when everything is in a package, people are not forced to think about the money they are spending as much, so those pain centers are not activated and they are able to relax more (US News, February 24, 2009).
Financial incentives increase long-term smoking cessation rates, find LDI CHI investigators. A large-scale study published in the February 12, 2009 New England Journal of Medicine showed that an incentive worth up to $750 resulted in a tripling in long-term quit rates among 878 employees at General Electric (Wall Street Journal; Associated Press; Bloomberg; USA Today; Science News; WebMD; Reuters; US News & World Report; BBC News; WSJ Health Blog; Los Angeles Times; Health Day; Scientific American; Irish Times). Listen to a BBC Radio interview about this study with Dr. Kevin Volpp, the study's lead author, by clicking on this link: podcast.
Copayment increase associated with gaps in heart medication use in a group of veterans. Jalpa Doshi, PhD and a team which included three other LDI CHI researchers published results in the journal Circulation on a quasi-experimental study comparing lipid-lowering medication adherence in patients before and after the 2002 copayment increase at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center. (Washington Post, January 12, 2009; USA Today, January 12, 2009; Forbes, January 12, 2009). The study was cited by Senator Patty Murray at the VA Secretary Senate Confirmation hearing on January 14, 2009 (CSPAN).
Incentives Motivate Weight Loss. New research conducted by a team of researchers from the LDI CHI is featured in stories that aired on more than 130 CBS, ABC, NCB and Fox News affiliates across the country, including New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit and Las Vegas as well as on Good Morning America. The team, led by Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD, and George Loewenstein, PhD, published findings in the December 10, 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that financial incentives are helpful in motivating people to lose weight. For a summary of the research, see the Carnegie Mellon University homepage. The research was also highlighted in the New York Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, US News and World Report, Time, Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times (See interviews by CBS3 News, December 9, 2008; Good Morning America, December 10, 2008; medpagetoday, December 9, 2008; and ABC Radio National, Australia, February 2, 2009). Coverage continues on this hot topic (New York Times, February 5, 2009, ABC Philadelphia, April 1, 2009).
Affiliated faculty member Mark Pauly, PhD and doctoral student Fredric Blavin, in the lead article of the December 2008 Journal of Health Economics explore how the use of evidence based medicine and cost-effectiveness analysis can add useful insight to the classical moral hazard framework in the optimal design of insurance (Journal of Health Economics, December, 2008).
National Healthcare Incentives Institute kick-off meeting October 19-21. The National Healthcare Incentives Institute convened public policy, business and academic experts in Washington, D.C. to discuss evaluation and implementation of initiatives related to healthcare incentives. LDI CHI co-sponsored the event, and Director Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD, spoke on “Pay for Performance for Patients (P4P4P): Using Behavioral Economics to Make Incentives More Effective” (National Healthcare Incentives Institute website).
Wall Street Journal article about ‘spendthrifts’ and ‘tightwads’ profiles work done by affiliated faculty Scott Rick, PhD and George Loewenstein, PhD (Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2008).
David Asch, MD, MBA asks pertinent questions regarding the financial system bail-out(Philadelphia Inquirer, October 2, 2008)
Aetna teams up with Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD and Stephen Kimmel, MD to examine the impact of lottery incentives on medication adherence (AMNews, August 4, 2008).
Rachel Werner, MD, PhD was interviewed by Caring.com about the meager incentives available to safety-net hospitals to institute quality improvement programs. Dr. Werner compared the quality of care at safety-net and non-safety-net hospitals in an article published in the May, 2008 Journal of the American Medical Association (Caring.com, May 13, 2008).
Application of behavioral economic theories can foster healthy choices, according to LDI CHI affiliated faculty George Loewenstein, PhD; Stephen Kimmel, MD; Scott Halpern, MD, PhD; and Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD (ACP Internist, May, 2008).
LDI CHI researchers were cited for their Journal of the American Medical Association commentary on “asymmetric paternalism.” George Loewenstein, PhD and Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD of LDI CHI collaborated with Troyen Brennan, MD, JD, MPH of Aetna, Inc. on an article which describes the theory behind employing various incentives and institutional structures to improve health behavior. They explain that the expectation of tangible benefits can help people make decisions that are beneficial to them without impinging on their freedom of choice or adversely affecting others (PsychCentral, November 29, 2007).