Smoking Cessation Rates Improve With Personalized Treatment, Incentives

Smoking cessation rates are higher among participants who receive patient navigation and financial incentives compared with usual care alone, according to the findings of a recent study.

For their randomized clinical trial, the researchers recruited 352 adults who had smoked 10 or more cigarettes per day within the week before baseline, and were contemplating or preparing to quit smoking from general internal and family practices.
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A total of 177 patients were randomly assigned to the intervention group, who had received up to 4 hours of patient navigation delivered over 6 months in addition to usual care and financial incentives for biochemically confirmed smoking cessation at 6 and 12 months. The control group included 175 participants who had received enhanced usual care.

At 12 months, 21 participants (11.9%) in the intervention group had quit smoking, compared with 4 participants (2.3%) in the control group. In subgroup analyses, the researchers found that the intervention was particularly beneficial for older participants, women, those with a yearly household income of $20,000 or less, and nonwhite participants.

“In this study of adult daily smokers at 1 large urban safety-net hospital, patient navigation and financial incentives for smoking cessation significantly increased the rates of smoking cessation,” the researchers concluded.

—Melissa Weiss

Reference:

Lasser KE, Quintiliani LM, Truong V, et al. Effect of patient navigation and financial incentives on smoking cessation among primary care patients at an urban safety-net hospital: a randomized clinical trial. JAMA Intern Med. 2017;177(12):1798–1807. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.4372.