From Wellness Week to Eat Local Week to an entire series on the ethics of food, Stanford offers a wide variety of health-related events. Since its launch in October of 2007, BeWell@Stanford (http://BeWell.stanford.edu) has served as an online gathering ground for these events and for those interested in many aspects of health. BeWell applies the appeal of social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to wellness. Users can create profiles and join specific communities. Prompts encourage users to interact, ask questions and share information with other similarly interested individuals. The site also allows users to set goals and log daily results. Avid members can even journal their progress. The BeWell Web site uses, as one New England Journal of Medicine article on BeWell argues, the “network phenomena... to spread positive health behaviors.”

BeWell also reflects the growing attempts of large organizations to lower healthcare costs by using positive incentives to promote healthier lifestyles. For example, over the past few years, IBM has paid over $130 million to its employees in awards for exercising and quitting smoking.

BeWell not only stands to increase Stanford’s communal health, it also allows Stanford members to exchange and pass on information regarding local health events. Recently, students used BeWell to start and spread information about Oxygen Bar 101, a weekly Yoga seminar in the Stanford Graduate Community Center.

Earlier in the academic year, BeWell@Stanford also played an active role in promoting the Pac-10’s fitness challenge — Stanford logged over 725,000 minutes of physical activity in five days, eventually winning the inaugural challenge. Stanford’s faculty and staff, in fact, won their division in absolute numbers. Despite Stanford’s relative small size in comparison to public state colleges, Stanford staff topped the logged output of other Pac-10 schools.

As opposed to only focusing on exercise or healthy eating, BeWell@Stanford focuses on wellness. For a student body that is perhaps as likely to over-exercise as it is to under-exercise, the emphasis on wellness as the synergy of physical, social and spiritual health should not be undervalued.

Stanford University can take pride in its implementation of BeWell@Stanford. Since its launch, the site has registered roughly 8,500 users and enjoyed participation of close to 20 percent of Stanford’s entire campus — remarkably high numbers. Stanford is also the first college to employ such an innovative wellness service. When compared to personal trainers and support groups, such an online community provides more accessible support at a much reduced cost. BeWell provides a cost-effective, positive community for fostering wellness at Stanford.