Getting Research into Practice 2010

Getting Research into Practice (GRiP)

Category proudly sponsored by:

Champions: Rubin Minhas, Clinical Director, and Karen Pettersen, Deputy Editor, Clinical Evidence

Recognising those who have successfully introduced evidence based improvements into patient care.

Dr Kevin Volpp and his team at Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics Centre for Health Incentives (USA) created a partnership with the General Electric Corporation to test financial incentives to reduce smoking cessation.

Research that actually changes practice and improves health outcomes is the objective of most health researchers, and this proved to be the case for Kevin Volpp and his team at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

The team in Philadelphia created a partnership with the General Electric Corporation to test financial incentives as a means to reduce the prevalence of smoking among the company’s employees, with great success.

The research, involving a randomised controlled trial of 878 smokers, showed that financial performance incentives could lead to a quit rate of 9% over 15-18 months, compared with a rate of 3% without such incentives.

Financial incentives to individuals were paid on confirmation of smoking cessation by biochemical testing. They received $100 for completing a smoking cessation programme, $250 for stopping smoking within six months of enrolling in the study, and a further $400 for confirmed abstinence for an additional six months.

General Electric has now decided to implement this approach for all its 152,000 employees in the United States in 2010.

Dr Volpp says: “It’s a great honour to be recognised by the BMJ Group. The BMJ Group and its publications has international reach, and the lessons we’ve learnt should carry over easily across nations and cultures.”

“In health settings people have the same foibles and lapses as they do in other parts of their everyday lives. By understanding these, sometimes we can help overcome them and help people do the things they want to do but have difficulty doing, like lose weight, exercise more, and quit smoking.”

Dr Volpp emphasises the team effort of the work, saying: “Not only did it represent a partnership across physicians, economists, psychologists, and other scholars at the University of Pennsylvania but also a partnership with the General Electric Corporation and with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which funded the work.”