Techcrunch has an interesting post today on BeWell@Stanford, "an online community that aims to promote healthy living among the school’s 30,000 students, faculty, and staff."
This notion that social networking can help support and promote wellness is a good example of how the so-called "people-powered Web" can be a part of the solution for a more innovative healthcare ecosystem that both improves the healthiness of broad populations, and in so doing may reduce costs.
This wellness front is something that I know IBM takes seriously. In fact, the company actually provides small bonuses for IBMers who commit to a regular exercise regime, and another for those who quit smoking.
This notion of prevention as the best medicine is far from new, but the idea that a community could help support and sustain better health of individuals is part of what makes the world of social computing so interesting today.
Finally, I think there's an interesting parallel between the increasingly important role that wellness/prevention plays in healthcare and the idea that efficiency, waste reduction and conservation play on the energy front.
As the CEO of Duke Energy has noted in a Tom Friedman column "Go Green and Save Energy," becoming a society vastly more efficient is effectively like finding a new source of energy. What's more, energy savings is the cleanest new source of energy. What he proposes is deep new financial incentives to energy producers to save energy, not just provide it.
Similarly, such efforts at wellness and prevention like Standford's new initiative are really about new mechanisms to give people the incentive and social support to be healthier, which while not very sexy on the face if it, may be one of the biggest avenues of societal innovation in healthcare at our disposal.
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