WellTok closes $18.7 million funding round; social health management

WellTok, the Denver-based social health management company, announced this morning that it raised $18.7 million in a Series B funding round for its efforts in stoking corporate health benefit engagement. 

Emergence Capital Partners, InterWest Partners and New Enterprise Associates participated in the funding round. WellTok said it plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and strategic partnership efforts, expand into new markets and build its sales teams.

Additionally, chairman Jeff Margolis (of TriZetto fame) was named CEO to lead the company down the paths of monetization and scale. To date, it calls two of the five largest health plan organizations in the U.S. customers, with nine in total.

The company's product is called CaféWell. It aims to use social, community, personalization and gamification strategies — it's offically called a "social health network" — to incentivize people to engage with their health plans. Instead of your employer simply telling you to be healthier (go on, get up, step away from the screen already, gosh), it uses WellTok to plug into the animal instincts in your brain to entice you to do so, whether it's walking around the block during lunch or just taking time to de-stress.

A number of studies in recent years have demonstrated that a healthy workforce is a significantly less costly workforce, a boon to this particular area of health IT. WellTok maintains that its platform is more effective than the wellness engagement platforms in use today.

As you would expect, there's a significant security and compliance component (HITRUST CSF) that sets this network apart from most other social enterprise efforts. In health IT, anonymity in a social network is a good thing.