Completion or Task-based Engagement incentives for Well-child Visits

In a Medicaid managed health care system, patients age off their parent’s electronic health record at 18 years old but are still eligible for annual “Well Child” visits until age 21. In many cases, these "adult" patients are “lost” to the health care system because the system is no longer legally allowed to coordinate care with the patient’s parents. In this work, we test approaches to engaging these patients with the health care system and encouraging them to complete an annual Well Child visit. In particular, we test whether financial incentives can increase engagement and whether a completion-based incentive that rewards patients for completing a Well Child visit, is as effective at increasing Well-Child visit completion rates as a task-based incentive that reward patients for each step in the process of completing the visit (electronic health record sign-up, appointment set-up, and appointment completion). By setting total compensation the same across these two financial incentive arms, standard economic theory would predict that the completion and task-based incentives have the same effect on completion rates. However, a task-based incentive, which provides intermediate rewards, may better maintain engagement and thus further increase completion rates.