Can you get paid to kick bad habits?
That’s the question Vincere Health, an early-stage startup out of Harvard Innovation Labs, wants to answer.
The startup is developing an app to help users quit smoking by offering them financial incentives. At the start of joining Vincere Health’s program, users will be able to set personal parameters for what they wish to get out of the app. Then, each day when checking into the app, they will test their adherence to their goals by blowing into an attachable breathalyzer device. If they successfully reduce the amount they smoke and subsequently stop altogether, they receive periodic, immediate financial awards. The total estimated amount users could earn for a successfully completed program would be between $100 and $600, depending on the employers and sponsors (friends and family) that fund the sum. The Vincere Health team anticipates that these earnings will be available for users to cash out biweekly or monthly.
“Essentially, we're trying to reduce the time between someone carrying out an action, approving of certain behavior and getting rewarded for it,” said Shalen DeSilva, co-founder and CEO of Vincere Health. “Fundamentally, we're delivering a real-time financial incentive for people who prove their smoking behavior.”
Funding for these financial incentives will be provided by companies who are interested in the program for employees, academic medical centers, inspired family members, or in super-motivated cases, the individuals themselves. The app will be available through the iOS and Google Play stores, and the physical, attachable breathalyzer product will be available through the individual's employer or health care provider.
Providing financial incentives to encourage smokers to quit is not an unfamiliar concept. In a clinical trial conducted with employees at the General Electric Corporation, one group of employees was given financial incentives to quit smoking, while another group was simply encouraged to. The group which was given financial incentives ended up with a quit rate three times that of the other group. Since this trial, a number of companies have adopted anti-smoking policies with financial incentives in order to save money on smoking-related disease coverage.
There are also a number of apps like Quit it Lite and Quit Tracker that are available to help users quit smoking. But the majority of these, rather than providing an immediate incentive, simply tell a user how much money they have saved by not buying cigarettes.
“On the Fintech side, the evidence base is fairly strong as far as incentives are concerned,” said Jake Keteyian, co-founder and COO of Vincere Health. “On the behavioral science side, if you can shorten the period between action and reward, you’re really hitting a trigger in human psychology.”
DeSilva and Keteyian were inspired to found Vincere Health after they met at Harvard Innovation Labs. The duo chose to focus the app on smoking prevention because of personal ties: DeSilva had gone through the quitting process himself while Keteyian had family members that had struggled with nicotine dependence.
“I think a big part of the common ground is that we both wanted to get out of the corporate world and feel like we were doing something impactful at scale,” said Keteyian.
Having previously been boot-strapped, Vincere Health is now part of the Alchemist Accelerator, where it’s preparing to raise pre-seed funding.
In the future, Vincere Health plans to obtain more funding and to locate social impact investors and partners that have an interest in the digital health space.
"We really want to be a poster child for people with multi-disciplinary skill sets to come together around a significant public health issue,” said DeSilva.
