Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. Public policies like higher cigarette taxes and expanded access to evidence-based cessation treatment can help lower smoking rates in Indianapolis and across the state. But employers looking to help their employees quit and improve their health today have a number of tools already available, beyond these longer-term policy efforts. Take the experience of two Fortune 500 companies who used incentives to help employees quit. In 2004, General Electric launched a program that offered employees up to $750 if they quit smoking for 12 months. To test the impact, GE randomly offered the incentive to some […]

Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. The opioid epidemic continues to take a devastating toll in Indianapolis and across the state. While there are no silver bullets, there are interventions that have strong evidence for impact. Chief among them is medication-assisted treatment, or MAT. MAT is often controversial because of the common misconception that it simply substitutes one drug for another (i.e., methadone for heroin). On the contrary, medications like buprenorphine and methadone provide a limited dosage to reduce cravings and withdrawal and help individuals with opioid use disorder on their path to recovery. Most importantly, it works. There is ample […]