Personalities: Social Wellness

As a first-year med student at Brown University in 2005, Rajiv Kumar felt frustrated by the preventable diseases that plague Americans who lead unhealthy lifestyles. So Kumar, now 26, cofounded Shape Up Rhode Island, a nonprofit organization geared to encourage participants to exercise more, eat better, and lose weight by connecting them through an online social network. The next year, Kumar founded a similar organization, Shape Up The Nation, which partners with employers to promote healthy lifestyles among employees. Both organizations count themselves among the first wellness companies to use social networking to drive behavior change and reduce healthcare costs.

On why workplace wellness programs succeed: We saw the workplace as an ideal location for a lifestyle intervention because we spend so much time there and the people we work with tend to have a big influence on us. Currently they're spreading unhealthy behavior in many cases with junk food, or taking the elevator to the second floor, or fighting for that parking space right next to the door—but if we can exploit that trusted social network, we can spread healthier behaviors within the workplace.

On the future of social wellness: We already see social networking wellness programs exploding, and it will continue to grow. It's going to take a collective effort to change our behavior. A huge percent of healthcare costs are being driven simply by our lifestyle, so it's the moral imperative if we're going to reduce the cost of healthcare that people take more personal responsibility.

On why social incentives trump financial incentives: Paying people to lose weight is like paying a child to get A's on their report card. You might get more A's, but it's not sustainable in the long term. It's not teaching the child the value of education and making them want to learn for the sake of learning. We see health in a similar way—you can see short-term gains from paying people to lose a few pounds, but they're going to gain it back because you haven't helped them tap in to their intrinsic desire and motivation to be healthy, and you haven't created an environment and a structure that will help them maintain that over the long term.

—Marianne Aiello