[1] Volpp earned his bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in biology from Harvard and was a Rotary Scholar at Freie Universitat in Berlin, Germany.
[3] For 20 years, he also served as an attending physician at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center and worked as a part-time primary care clinician and hospitalist.
One study led by Volpp was a large randomized trial of financial incentives and smoking cessation among employees at General Electric.
[5] The main trial paper led GE to implement a benefit design change based on this study to its 150,000 US employees.
[6][7] Follow-up work[8] extended this among employees at CVS and also demonstrated a tripling in long-term smoking cessation rates and led to a national program among CVS employees called “700 Good Reasons.”[9] This was followed by a large-scale study of financial incentives and smoking cessation that found that offering standard pharmacologic therapies and e-cigarettes were no more effective than control whereas either gain- or loss-framed incentives tripled smoking cessation rates among employees of 54 different employers[10][11] His team has also conducted studies examining the impact of behavioral economic strategies on increasing physical activity,[12][13] medication adherence,[14] and on physician behavior.