This site presents the business case for smoking cessation. The information is designed primarily for use by health insurance plans. However employers, purchasers, and health benefits managers can also gain valuable insight into the economic advantages of a range of smoking cessation programs.

To make the business case for smoking cessation, interventions must demonstrate that they positively affect future health care expenditures and productivity, or have a positive return on investment (ROI) for health insurance plans, employers, and other payors. To demonstrate the economic value of smoking cessation for insurance plans, researchers at the Center for Health Research, Kaiser Permanente Northwest (CHR) teamed with America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) to develop a simple tool that can help you quickly estimate the potential ROI of common smoking cessation interventions. The results of your ROI analyses should help your organization decide between tobacco control services.

The ROI Calculator contains preloaded data that represent the disease, health care use, and plan eligibility for a cohort of smokers, and how cessation programs alter these experiences. You can easily modify many of the model inputs to reflect the key smoking and environmental factors of your population.

We limited the scope of user inputs to keep the model “user-friendly.” The model assumes that insurance plans incur the cost of cessation programs (except for enrollee co-pays) even though the health insurance market contains a wide range of cost-sharing strategies. Other restrictions are described in the methodology section.

Our research showed clinical interventions to reduce smoking provide a positive return on investment within 2–3 years for health plans and immediate savings for employers. A manuscript describing the research and its implications has been submitted for publication in a peer-review journal.

The Executive Summary link to the left describes the original research that led to the calculator and how the calculator works. The other links summarize the ROI Methodology, introduce the ROI Team, and provide additional resources.

Click the ROI Caclulator button to the left or below to begin (return users: enter your email address).