Washington, April 29 (ANI): Cash rewards for healthier habits may work, if you add on one more condition - peer pressure, according to a new study.
A growing number of companies are offering employees an opportunity to boost earning power at work via cash incentives to stay healthy. Under the Affordable Care Act, employers will soon be able to offer even larger financial incentives to prod healthy lifestyle behaviors among their workforce, such as quitting smoking and losing weight.
But people who are offered money for weight loss may be much more successful when awards are based on a group's performance - rather than just their own - according to a study led by the Ann Arbor VA Healthcare System and the University of Michigan Health System.
Group-based financial incentives led to nearly three times more weight loss than cash awards based on an individual's weight loss success alone, according to the findings.
"We found that these incentives were substantially more powerful when delivered in groups, which has important implications for both policymakers and the employers who are considering offering them," said lead author Jeffrey T. Kullgren, M.D., M.S., M.P.H., health services researcher in the VA Center for Clinical Management Research and the division of general medicine in the U-M Medical School.
The study examined two types of incentive strategies among employees who were obese at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. In the first group, individuals were offered 100 dollars each month they met or exceeded weight loss goals.
In the second group, individuals were placed into groups of five people in which 500 dollars was split among the participants who met or exceeded monthly weight loss goals - upping competition by allowing some to earn more than 100 dollars if other members didn't meet goals.
After six months, the group approach overwhelmingly beat out the singles when it came to enticing people to shed pounds.
"Approaches such as 'The Biggest Loser' have received popular attention as ways to harness group dynamics to encourage weight loss, but the winner-take-all nature could be discouraging for everyone but the most successful person. We need more data to compare how different group-based approaches stack up against each other," noted Kullgren, also a researcher for the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.
The findings appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine. (ANI)
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