Financial incentives and proactive calling for reducing barriers to tobacco treatment among socioeconomically disadvantaged women: A factorial randomized trial.

Improved strategies and scalable interventions to engage low-socioeconomic status (SES) smokers in tobacco treatment are needed. We tested an intervention designed to connect low-SES smokers to treatment services, implemented through Minnesota's National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program (Sage) in 2017; the trial was designed to last 3 months (July through October). Participants were female smokers who were 250% below the federal poverty level (randomized N = 3723; analyzed N = 3365).

The Efficacy of Direct Mail, Patient Navigation, and Incentives for Increasing Mammography and Colonoscopy in the Medicaid Population: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Despite lower cancer screening rates and survival rates in the Medicaid population compared with those with private insurance, there is a dearth of population-based, evidence-based interventions targeting Medicaid clients to address this problem. This study reports results of a population-based randomized controlled trial (RCT) among all individuals enrolled in Minnesota's Medicaid program who were overdue for breast cancer ( = 22,113) and/or colorectal cancer ( = 94,294) screening. Individuals were randomized to intervention or control groups.

Coupling Financial Incentives With Direct Mail in Population-Based Practice.

Financial incentives are being used increasingly to encourage a wide array of health behaviors because of their well-established efficacy. However, little is known about how to translate incentive-based strategies to public health practice geared toward improving population-level health, and a dearth of research exists on how individuals respond to incentives through public health communication strategies such as direct mail. This study reports results of a population-based randomized controlled trial testing a direct mail, incentive-based intervention for promoting mammography uptake.

Connecting low-income smokers to tobacco treatment services.

The Affordable Care Act calls for using population-level incentive-based interventions, and cigarette smoking is one of the most significant health behaviors driving costs and adverse health in low-income populations. Telehealth offers an opportunity to facilitate delivery of evidence-based smoking cessation services as well as incentive-based interventions to low-income populations. However, research is needed on effective strategies for linking smokers to services, how to couple financial incentives with telehealth, and on how to scale this to population-level practice.

Interpersonal Communication and Smoking Cessation in the Context of an Incentive-Based Program: Survey Evidence From a Telehealth Intervention in a Low-Income Population.

The tobacco epidemic disproportionately affects low-income populations, and telehealth is an evidence-based strategy for extending tobacco cessation services to underserved populations. A public health priority is to establish incentive-based interventions at the population level in order to promote long-term smoking cessation in low-income populations. Yet randomized clinical trials show that financial incentives tend to encourage only short-term steps of cessation, not continuous smoking abstinence.

Does it pay to pay people to share information? Using financial incentives to promote peer referral for mammography among the underinsured.

Purpose: Efforts to screen underinsured women for breast cancer face challenges in reaching desired audiences. One option is viral marketing through peer referral. We sought the optimal way to solicit nominations of peers.

Behavioral consequences of conflict-oriented health news coverage: the 2009 mammography guideline controversy and online information seeking.

Building on channel complementarity theory and media-system dependency theory, this study explores the impact of conflict-oriented news coverage of health issues on information seeking online. Using Google search data as a measure of behavior, we demonstrate that controversial news coverage of the U.S.

The availability of community ties predicts likelihood of peer referral for mammography: geographic constraints on viral marketing.

Engaging social networks to encourage preventive health behavior offers a supplement to conventional mass media campaigns and yet we do not fully understand the conditions that facilitate or hamper such interpersonal diffusion. One set of factors that should affect the diffusion of health campaign information involves a person's community. Variables describing geographic communities should predict the likelihood of residents accepting campaign invitations to pass along information to friends, family, and others.

Effect of direct mail as a population-based strategy to increase mammography use among low-income underinsured women ages 40 to 64 years.

Women with inadequate health insurance have lower mammography rates than the general population. Finding successful strategies to enroll eligible women is an ongoing challenge for the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program. To test the effectiveness of a population-based strategy to increase mammography utilization among low-income underinsured women ages 40 to 64 years, a randomized trial was conducted to assess the effect of two mailed interventions on mammography utilization through Sage, the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program in Minnesota.

Incorporation of a successful community-based mammography intervention: dissemination beyond a community trial.

Although a variety of interventions to increase breast cancer screening have been found to be effective in community-based trials, their ultimate contribution depends on the extent to which they are incorporated (i.e., adopted and adapted) by community organizations.

Randomized controlled trial of a repeat mammography intervention: effect of adherence definitions on results.

Background: As overall mammography rates approach national goals, mammography promotion efforts must increasingly focus on repeat adherence. This randomized controlled trial examined the effect of two interventions on repeat mammography utilization using various adherence definitions.

Methods: 1,558 women aged 40-63 receiving a mammogram through a federally funded screening program were randomized to three groups: mailed reminder (minimum group); mailed thank you card, newsletters, and reminder (maximum group); no mailings (control).

Promoting repeat mammography use: insights from a systematic needs assessment.

This article describes the process and outcome of a needs assessment conducted to guide the development of interventions to increase repeat mammography use among participants in a federally funded cancer screening program. Health behavior theory and data from a phone survey are used to uncover key barriers to repeat mammography use and to identify fruitful intervention approaches for modifying them. Estimates of (a) compliance with mammography guidelines, (b) readiness to adopt regular mammography use, (c) the most common reasons for not being rescreened, and (d) population attributable risks associated with various predictors of repeat mammography use are presented and, with guidance from the transtheoretical model of behavior change, used to make inferences about the type of intervention strategies most appropriate for promoting repeat mammography use in this population.