If you want to influence user behavior, offering an incentive isn’t enough.  You also have to make the implementation of that incentive practical and efficient.

For example, let’s say that a health insurance company is willing to lower your premiums if you lose weight, or lower your cholesterol, or lower your blood pressure.  The incentive is a direct financial gain, but how does the insurance company verify that you are doing these things?  Maybe they could provide a form for your doctor to sign, but that is a process that could easily be manipulated.

Yesterday I read in Newsweek about a group that solved a problem very similar to this in a very innovative way.  The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a network of 46 affiliated professors around the world who are united by their use of Randomized Evaluations (REs) to answer questions critical to poverty alleviation.  They are headquartered within the Economics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

J-PAL took on the challenge of helping to eradicate tuberculosis.   As the Newsweek article noted:

Tuberculosis is uniquely formidable because it requires a powerful cocktail of antibiotics that take at least 6 months to kill the disease – long after symptoms recede.  As with any bacterial infections, a partial course of drugs is worse than no drugs at all, because it promotes antibiotic resistance, a big part of the reason that TB now kills between 1.2 million and 2 million people every year.

So how do you get patients, particularly the poor and uneducated, to continue taking these drugs after their symptoms have disappeared?  If you had the ability to provide a direct financial incentive, how would you implement it?
J-PAL solved this challenge by inventing and distributing to patients a urinalysis strip with hidden codes that would reveal themselves when they were covered with urine that contained the TB drugs.  Patients could text the code on their cell phone to receive free cell minutes.  This was a self-monitored (and therefore very efficient) solution offering an instant reward.  (Granted this story is a few years old, but I just read about it yesterday and it’s definitely interesting enough to profile here).

As we struggle in the U.S. with a combination of escalating risk factors like obesity and (not-coincidentally) increasing healthcare costs, innovations like this could lead the way towards future rewards systems for individuals to take preventative health measures and to live healthier lives.

(Image source: www4.uwm.edu)