Various financial incentives help smokers 'kick the butt'

A new study has suggested that people are likelier to quit smoking if they are offered various financial incentives.

Four different financial incentive programs, each worth roughly 800 dollars over six months, all help more smokers kick the habit than providing free access to behavioral counseling and nicotine replacement therapy. Further, the way in which equally-sized payouts are structured influences their effectiveness.

The findings are the result of a year-long randomized trial among CVS Caremark (now CVS Health) employees that was conducted by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The study enrolled 2,538 participants from across the United States during an eight-month period in 2012. Participants were then assigned to one of five groups: individual reward (reward based on individual performance), collaborative reward (reward based on group performance), individual deposit (requiring an upfront deposit of 150 dollars with subsequent matching funds), competitive deposit (competing for other participants' deposits and matching funds) or usual care (including informational resources and free smoking cessation aids).

Of the participants assigned to the reward-based programs, 90 percent accepted the assignment, compared to just 14 percent of those assigned to the deposit-based programs. As a result, 16 percent of those assigned to reward programs remained smoke-free for six months, compared with 10 percent in the deposit programs, and 6 percent in the usual care group. The group-oriented programs were not significantly more successful than the individual-oriented programs (14 vs. 12 percent).

Senior author Kevin Volpp said that as they continue to see smoking as the number one cause of preventable death in the United States, it's important for employers to consider different options to use benefit design to help their workers quit, adding that when compared to the estimated 4,000 to 6,000 dollars incremental annual cost associated with employing a smoker over a non-smoker, a 700 to 800 dollars incentive paid only to those who quit seems well worth the cost.

The study appears online first in the New England Journal of Medicine.