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As more health care plans include cost reductions for wellness — employees receiving financial incentives to keep themselves fit — many wonder what role technology can play.

Shaan Gandhi is Chief Medical Officer at Wellable, “a wellness incentive company that enables health plans, employers, and wellness providers to leverage mobile apps to implement robust wellness programs. ”

Gandhi wrote recently in Huffington Post about the ways technology can help provide incentive for employees to stay healthy. Gandi cites a behavioral model from Stanford University's BJ Fogg that shows “that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing.”

So if you have the motivation to be healthy, and your smart phone gives you the ability to track your healthy behavior, what is trigger?

Writes Gandhi: “Your jogging app can record the number of miles you ran, and your insurer, based on those data, can give you per-mile premium discounts. The discounts can be adjusted based on the difficulty of your jog, how often your jog and the total number of miles you ran. For the first time, when you have the motivation to go running, you have a specific monetary trigger you can go after, an incentive that accrues for every mile you run. And, this coincidence of motivation and trigger is enabled by the ability to track your miles using your smartphone. You get a unique incentive that encourages you to get moving, and the insurer gets a healthier you. It's a win-win.”

Gandi concludes: “By combining the tracking abilities of your smartphone with the financial incentive triggers of your insurer, both of them can encourage you to stay healthy. You, your smartphone and your insurer form a wellness triangle, a triangle focused on helping you stay on the path toward better health.”