Celebrating Five Years of Success Examining a groundbreaking solution for controlling health care costs using financial incentives to invoke doctor-patient mutual accountability

Our nation is in the midst of an important debate on health care. The issues revolve around affordability, accessibility, quality and funding. Of these issues, the one that all experts agree must be resolved for the good of the country is the high cost of healthcare. Supported by years of testing and overwhelming empirical evidence by independent research, the MedEncentive Program has surfaced as a real breakthrough in resolving the issue of healthcare afforda‐ bility. This report presents the findings from five years of testing and the independent research that vali‐ dates the Program’s efficacy and its underlining design principles. Background - From 1997 through 2007, a small group of innovators consisting of practicing physicians, a medical academician, a self-insured business owner, a medical practice management consultant, and a health insurance executive sought to find ways to align the interests of healthcare consumers, providers and insurers. After years of studying the issues, the group concluded that the single most pressing problem in healthcare was affordability. Understanding that the majority of healthcare costs are driven by people’s poor health habits and medical providers’ variable practice patterns, the group focused on using incentives to align these stakeholders’ interests to improve both health behaviors and practice patterns. This thought process led to the development of what would become a web-based incentive system called MedEncentive.