News Feature | August 1, 2014

Loyalty Rewards Fail To Keep Patients Engaged

Katie Wike

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Patient Loyalty Rewards Failure

Offering patients rewards for engaging in their own healthcare works in the short term, but research shows the effect quickly wears off.

In November, Health IT Outcomes reported some physicians were offering incentives as a way to get patients more involved in their healthcare and help the physician meet Meaningful Use requirements. EHR Intelligence wrote at the time, “Just as customers of car insurance companies receive rebates or discounts for safe driving, health insurance payers could help drive engagement by offering some sort of reward, whether it’s a bonus check or loyalty points. Engaged patients are healthier patients, and healthier patients are cheaper ones.”

Now, a study of 140,000 potential users of an online health intervention site, published in the Journal of Internet Medical Research, found that although rewards systems may work to engage patients at first, the novelty soon wears off and patients lose interest.

"Internet-based health programs have been shown to be effective in reducing risk for cardiovascular disease. However, their rates of enrollment and engagement remain low," explain researchers. "It is currently unclear whether rewards from established loyalty programs can serve as a conditioned stimulus to improve the use of a freely available Internet-based program."

MobiHealth News reports 52 percent of the experiment group enrolled in the program with rewards, compared to just 4 percent of the control group. Surprisingly though, "When it came to the second assessment six weeks later, the control group had actually passed up the rewards group in terms of percent participation, with 24 percent participation to the experiment group’s 21 percent."

The study concluded, "Our findings suggest that a single exposure of loyalty rewards may be used to encourage individuals to enroll in an Internet-based preventative health program, but additional strategies are required to maintain engagement level. Future studies need to examine the schedules of loyalty reward reinforcement on the long-term engagement level of Internet-based health programs."