Once thought of as a rare employee perk, wellness programs and incentivizing tools are almost everywhere, as employers try to take a proactive role in the health of their employees.

Returning to Health 2.0, Jordan Goldberg showed how StickK users set a goal and either get there or suffer the financial or social consequences of their inaction.  And of course he mentioned what’s progressed in his business’ focus on employers since last year.

Returning to Health 2.0, Jordan will show you how Stickk users set a goal and either get there or suffer the financial or social consequences of their inaction. And of course he’ll tell us what’s progressed in his business’ focus on employers since last year.

Jordan Goldberg demonstrates stickK, a new goal-setting web application. Based off the concept of “Commitment Contracts” which bind you into achieving a personal goal, stickK can be used for an endless amount of health-related goals.

In this session, Health 2.0 discusses how employers are actively engaging employees with results based wellness programs and providing educational services and tools. Encouraging employees to make better wellness decisions and improving access helps employers, too, since healthier employees mean less sick days, better productivity and lower insurance costs. We talked with a few companies that are embracing wellness programs, and saw the programs in action with live demos.

In the Health 2.0 Show for July 25th, Indu Subaiya announces Health 2.0’s first Developer Challenge “Using Public Data for Cancer Prevention and Control”, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. Then, we preview a panel from our Fall 2011 Conference, “User-Generated Health: From Intelligent Communities to Self-Tracking, and the Quest for Personalized Health Platforms” with specials guests Thomas Goetz of Wired Magazine and Gary Wolf of Quantified Self. This Health 2.0 show also covers other conference highlights, Health Innovation Week and the Berlin 2011 conference. Also in this show, we meet with founder of stickK, Jordan Goldberg, who demos their behavioral motivation tool and discusses other current trends in healthcare.

Communities are evolving from simple support mechanisms to becoming personalized platforms for disease management, behavior change and data analytics. We took a look at the themes of peer and professional support, self-tracking, information sharing and delivery, competition, real-time data streams, and carrot vs. stick – and saw the Health 2.0 tools and unplatforms that are driving consumer engagement and testing leading behavior change models to make the greatest real-world impact.