Brad Weinberg is a managing partner at Providence Health Solutions LLC, a leading provider of team-based corporate wellness programs. The company grew out of a Shape Up RI, a statewide nonprofit that Weinberg and fellow Brown Medical School student Rajiv Kumar founded in 2005 to help the state’s residents improve their health. Over the past three years, more than 20,000 people from across Rhode Island have participated, and a national version also has been launched.

Weinberg, a Kansas City native who received his undergraduate degree from Brown in 2003, will present Providence Health Solution’s newest product – a social-networking wellness Web site, Stay In Shape – at tonight’s Providence Geeks dinner, which will be held from 5:30 to 9 p.m. at Providence’s AS220. He talked with PBN recently to preview tonight’s presentation and explain how the company applies the Facebook-MySpace concept to wellness.

PBN: What is Stay in Shape? How does it work?

WEINBERG: Stay In Shape is a wellness portal that allows employees to connect with and challenge others at their company to improve their health or maintain a healthy lifestyle. Employees at a participating company sign-up, invite their colleagues to be their friends and challenge them to be more active, eat better and improve their health (e.g. quit smoking). It is a fun and easy way for co-workers to find colleagues to do activities with (e.g. running, biking, walking), to organize activities and to motivate each other.

PBN: So, will my friends be able to “poke” me to say I need to go jogging more often?

WEINBERG: Peer motivation is essential to our platform, but no poking … You can challenge your peers to do something (e.g. first one to run 20 miles), you can send encouragement messages to help motivate others and you can give a virtual “high-five” to people if they do something good. We have worked very hard to make the platform positive and encouraging and have a number of protections in place to keep it positive.

PBN: Why do you think the social-networking approach is a good fit for promoting wellness and fitness?

WEINBERG: Did your parents ever ask you: “If [your friend] jumped off a bridge, would you?” Two studies recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, written by Nicholas Christakis, illustrate the strong influence our peers can have on weight loss and smoking cessation. At our company, we believe that people want to be healthy and generally know what they need to do. But with how busy we are – we need a real powerful motivator to get us to find time to be active and eat better.

Our competitors think incentives are the answer, but we think this is a short-sighted approach. Incentives work in the short run, but to create lasting behavior change you need to create behaviors that can last. Our friends can help us create those behaviors and help us maintain those behaviors. And they don’t cost anything either …

PBN: Generally speaking, do you think things are getting better or worse on the wellness front in Rhode Island and across the country?

WEINBERG: Health has become a very important issue. Politicians, companies and individuals are beginning to realize how our choices are affecting us and our country. I think this is a great time to be involved in the wellness and preventative health.

PBN: How tech-savvy are most of your fellow med students?

WEINBERG: They all get it. We grew up with computers, the Internet, et cetera. It’s part of our daily life. My fellow med students are going to change the way medicine works, for the better. There are so many ways we can use technology to improve our health. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

To find out more, search www.PBN.com for stories about Shape Up RI, such as: “Rx for fitness: Community, teams, individual goals” (May 12, 2008) and “Nonprofit aims to make R.I. a model for weight loss” (Dec. 24, 2007).