Institute For The Future

Getting Paid to Lose Weight

Would you lose weight for $1,000? HealthyWage, a company that announced its public launch this week, believes that the promise of a financial incentive will encourage people to set health goals, such as losing weight, and stick with them for an extended period of time, and that they can create a viable business by offering these incentives.

According to TechCrunch, here's how HealthyWage works:

 

On the company’s website, people can register and complete a health risk assessment which identifies ways for them to improve their health. The individuals are then supposed to return to the website daily and enter specific data (e.g. what they ate, their activities throughout the day, drug compliance etc.) as part of their participation in a program created by Harvard physicians. After a year of participating in the program, successful consumers can earn up to $1000. Besides the direct financial incentive for them, they’d also be in better shape, which should result in a decline of health expenses over time.

 

[The] First challenge that is seeing its debut on HealthyWage today: a BMI Challenge, designed to help people lose weight and get rewarded for it if they succeed. Overweight Americans or the companies they work for can put in $200 on the ‘bet’ that they’ll get to a certain BMI (Body Mass Index) and ‘lose’ all that money if it doesn’t pan out. If they achieve the targeted BMI – helped by friends and relatives and even their doctors through the system – they get their money back fivefold.

 

It's an interesting--if fairly crude--effort to use some of the tools from behavioral economics and psychology to help people get healthier, in other words, though in the long-run, I think HealthyWage's greatest potential is in becoming a home for real-world health data of all sorts.

The company plans to make money off of the people who put up money but fail to lose weight, as well as through targeted ad revenue and by selling annonymized, aggregate health data. This latter point is key--the company's offer only stands for users who dutifully log in to the site and enter in personal health data on a regular basis--which, if successful, would give HealthyWage a large database of increasingly valuable health information that researchers, advertisers and other interested parties could use in productive ways.

 

That said, their business model will probably need to undergo some serious tweaks, if they hope to get it to work. Based on their planned structure, they'll need five people to fail to hit their health goals for every successful user, just to break even. If too many people lose weight, or reach their goals, it will put HealthyWage out of business.

 

HealthyWage also appears to be marketing their services to corporate clients who can use this platform for corporate wellness programs, which probably has more potential from a business perspective, but could also be more controversial.