A new study has observed that employees who are offered financial incentives are likely to participate 33 times more in wellness programs than their counterparts.
The study showed that adding an incentive can drastically change participation numbers, thus leading to a potential increase in overall health and a decrease in costs for health plans.
Lead author Jason Block, MD, TOS Member and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School's Department of Population Medicine, said that while the jury was still out about whether workplace wellness programs improve health, the programs have great potential and their goal was to evaluate what motivated people to participate in these programs and what strategies companies and insurers could use to get everyone involved.
The researchers compared the uptake of a telephone health coaching program among the 16,961 members who received financial incentives to the 974,782 members who did not. The research found that during the nearly 3 year follow-up period, 10 percent of the members with incentives began using the telephone health coaching, whereas only 0.3 percent of those without the incentives did so.
Eric Finkelstein, PhD, MHA, an Associate Research Professor in the Duke Global Health Institute at Duke University, said that the idea of using employer incentives to participate in health coaching is relatively new and this research gives them a solid foundation to build upon.
