At Mount Sinai, mobile app pilot improves medication adherence with monetary incentives

Mount Sinai Health System is trying a new way to get high-risk patients to take their medications: financial incentives. Supported by a grant from Health 2.0 and the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the New York health system has enrolled 12 patients in a pilot with startup Wealth.
“What I’m so impressed with is a lot of companies go out and say ‘We want to make this and this is going to solve that problem,'” Jill Carroll, an IT project manager at Mount Sinai, told MobiHealthNews. “What [Wellth] did is they said ‘Here’s a really big problem we want to solve’ and they did a ton of research and they were really utilizing research that’s been done in behavioral economics.”
Carroll will be sharing lessons learned from the pilot at the Digital and Personal Connected Health Conference, a one-day event in Las Vegas on March 5. With Wellth’s technology, patients can earn a few dollars a day for taking their pills on time, which can add up to a significant amount over a few months. At Mount Sinai, for example, patients can earn $50 for one month of adherence. To report their adherence, they simply snap a photo with their phone’s camera of the pills in hand.