Towards a Design Theory for IS Services Enabling Incentive-based Health Promotion in Organizations

Health information system services (HISS) have the potential to improve well-being of employees which, in turn, leads to a reduction of days of sickness absence and an increase in individual and organizational performance. However, low participation rates indicate a need to better understand incentives that motivate employees not only to join but also to stick to HISS-supported health promotion programs. Two concepts from behavioral choice theory, i.e. reinforcing value and delay discounting, may help improve our understanding in this regard. Thus, we present a very first version of a design theory for HISS that enable organizations to implement results-based incentives for health promotion programs, denoted as RIHISS. Selected aspects of this design theory are then evaluated by an online study with 249 employees. Results show that RIHISS are accepted for smoking cessation programs. An overview of future work concludes this work-in-progress.