Patient-centered financial incentives for health: Can employers get change for their dollars?

While employer-sponsored financial incentives for healthy behaviors have demonstrated the potential to promote short-term employee behavior change, the effectiveness of such incentives in promoting long-term health behavior change has often been disappointing. This paucity of sustained change could be explained by the many factors that shape employees' health behaviors, only some of which may be influenced by incentives. We discuss how employer-sponsored incentives for healthy behaviors could become more patient-centered, and thus perhaps more effective, by integrating insights from self-determination theory and health behavior theories, targeting employees' capacity for change, and using tailoring.