Helping People Beat Bad Habits and Improve Their Life Expectancy

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Kevin Volpp
Director, Center for Health Incentives, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics

David Asch
Executive Director, Leonard Davis Institute
University of Pennsylvania

Two University of Pennsylvania professors are using a grant through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and insights gained from behavioral economics research to help Americans exchange bad behaviors for good ones that can lead to healthier outcomes.

“We know that people in the short term have a lot of trouble changing their behavior in ways that are in their long-term best interest,” says Kevin Volpp, a professor of medicine and health care management.  “People aren’t very good at making these tradeoffs between the immediate gratification and delayed and often intangible benefits, such as good health 10 years from now.”

While such behavioral interventions as financial incentives, frequent feedback and other motivators have shown promise in changing behavior, these tactics typically require frequent contact.  Volpp and David Asch, a professor of health care management and economics, along with colleagues in the Wharton School and School of Medicine, are tackling this problem.  They are designing, building and testing an IT platform that facilitates participant tracking, monitoring using home-based devices, feedback, and automated payment systems that will provide investigators an easily customized web-based platform to evaluate behavioral interventions to promote health, including the use of financial incentives, frequent feedback, visual approaches to information, and social networks.

The IT platform also will provide older Americans, the general public, and public and private sector organizations with a web portal that can facilitate participation in innovative research to improve health behaviors at low cost.

As director of Penn’s Center for Health Incentives in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, Volpp is in constant pursuit of incentives that will lure patients away from damaging behaviors.  As a physician, he has been frustrated in his own clinical practice with patients who were unable to change their health behaviors, even in situations where they were clearly at high risk of suffering significant impairments in quality of life or life expectancy.  “You see the consequences of unhealthy behaviors all the time,” he says.  “A lot of the existing approaches just don’t work. It’s clear we need new approaches to help people.”  Learn more about behavioral economics>>

Volpp and Asch’s ARRA grant through the NIH is for $5,404,364. Through partnership with firms such as the web design firm P'unk Ave, this project will contribute significantly to the creation of high technology jobs in the Philadelphia region. Learn more >>