Cor, the B2B corporate wellness platform based in the District, just hired a chief commercial officer and would like to fill two other positions: CTO and UX/UI designer. Company CEO Nicholas Tolson says the new hires will improve Cor's product and work to "engage people in health."
Companies that purchase Cor give their employees access to the site's features, which include group fitness challenges. The IT team could take on the marketing team to see who can log the most minutes of exercise or lose the most weight, for example.
Tolson likens corporate wellness benefits to unused gym memberships. "People have them but they don't go," he explains. "Companies spend a lot of money on wellness benefits—[planning] softball and kickball games, subsidizing healthy food in the cafeteria for example—and participation is insanely low, between 5 percent and 20 percent.
Tolson reports that once businesses start using Cor's platform, engagement with corporate wellness benefits rises to 70 percent.
"We're looking at the health crisis from the corporate level," Tolson says. "We want to reach the part of the population that isn't helping themselves—the people who aren't spending money on a FitBit or looking at fitness apps on their phone."
Two of Cor's most successful clients include Indiana University (IU) Health and the Loudon County Public Schools. According to Tolson, Loudon's employees collectively lost 4,000 pounds last year, and IU's Health workers lost 25,000 pounds.
The platform also includes recipes, workout and health tips, a social component (chat feature), and real-time statistics so users can graph their progress. On the company side, Cor aggregates data to determine the value and impact of a business' corporate wellness program. This, says Tolson, can motivate managers to reach out with incentives or to reengage with employees.
Tolson also says that Cor can be used as a "conduit" for information about other corporate wellness benefits, whether that means alerting users to the availability of flu shots or sending out invites for a lunch and learn session about creating easy and healthy meals.
Cor, which graduated from Acceleprise's first class in 2012, works directly with benefits brokers, traditional wellness companies and incentive and total rewards companies. "We want to make sure we're incentivizing in smart ways," Tolson explains. "It's not necessarily the thing [that motivates people]. It's the recognition."