Alan Yates, vice president of marketing and sales for Numera|Social.

The road to healthy living is not always a smooth one. Whether we're trying to eat a low-cholesterol diet or lose 10 pounds before a vacation, changing our habits isn't an easy task. But a new Seattle company called Numera|Social believes it has a way to make healthy living a little easier, a little more fun and -- most importantly -- much more social.

The company, an offshoot of telehealth firm Numera, launched its Facebook platform in September with the intention of help healthcare organizations, from hospitals to insurance companies, encourage their patients and customers to make improvements to their health using the power of social networking.

Alan Yates, vice president of marketing for the company, said Numera|Social's headcount is currently "in the dozens," but is growing rapidly. Yates said the company continues to hire as more organizations reach out looking to adapt its platform for their own purposes.

What is Numera|Social?

Numera|Social is a Facebook and mobile application to help people improve their health. We have paid quite a bit of attention to the nuances of what it really takes for people to change their behavior and we’ve tried to implement that through a social plus mobile platform that we’re making available to all sorts of health-centered organizations to take on as their own.

How does it work?

In Facebook, (users) can launch the app like Farmville or any other social game... First an individual would go in and really think through their goals -- what do they want to accomplish? Once you’ve set goals, we then recommend personal health action plans to you, which are really the center of the application... There’s so much health information out there on the web that people actually get stuck, they can’t make a decision, so what we’ve tried to do is work with experts to develop action plans that really give people a blueprint to how they achieve their goal.

The third piece is we do offer objective measurements so you can upload data to a number of automated devices to keep track of your progress. The fourth major piece is the power of social influence, so really engaging the right people in your social circle to help you with your goals... You can join groups, you can invite other people to your groups, and that’s where the power of Facebook comes in, that you’re not reinventing your social circle, you are using your real social circle in order to help with you the important job of health improvement.

And people can be selective about who sees their data?

Yes, we’ve added a layer of privacy within our app on top of Facebook...and actually initially nothing that you do in the application is shared, so the default is private. The information is private, but you can go in and selectively decide what to share and who to share it with.

Do you have to be part of a health organization to use it?

It goes both ways. Any individual right now can jump on the application in Facebook and use the Numera|Social version, which we’ll keep available as a broad, generic version. But we’re creating more powerful private label versions of it as organizations work with us. It’s for payer and providers and health and wellness organizations, as well as employers, but mostly insurance companies and healthcare providers because they are so focused on health and wellness. They have the bullt-in incentive of cost control for health issues and, overall, they are going to be extremely focused on making this successful with they audience and using it as a benefit for their members, for their patients, for their customers.

Who are your current partners?

We are in beta testing right now with RealAge in particular, who is one of those private label partners. They have developed some action plans and they have a version of their app that they’re refining for themselves. We are working toward the same thing with HealthLens, which is associated with the Primary Care Foundation, which is a large group of innovative physicians. Since the (launch) event, we have been gratified to be contacted by a number of organizations, so all of the sudden we are working behind the scenes with many different companies to determine how they would like their version of the private label app to work.

Any gamification elements in the platform?

We built in challenges as part of the experience, so definitely people may want to challenge their best friends or challenge others to stay fit or to walk the most or to achieve certain goals in a better way. Over the long run, incentives will be built in so organizations who benefit from lower health care costs can apply those benefits to the individual as well and share the benefits with the individual. We’re trying to be very thoughtful about it and apply the right things from what we’ve learned about social game play, but not assuming that the world will want to play a game relative to their health.

For us it’s really the deeper concept of behavior change...and, yes there are some game mechanics and game psychology issues in there, but it’s really is about setting goals, committing to action plans, measuring progress engaging your social network, getting notifications, dealing with your personal triggers for the behavior that has gotten you into trouble.

What about competitors?

There are a range of companies that try to create a new social network out of an employee base, for example, and do employee wellness that way... But there’s no company that has this same strategy precisely, which is using Facebook plus mobile, number one, no one that we know who is really focused on that for health change.

Are you using any technologies from Numera in the Numera|Social app?

Numera has a long history as a telehealth organization -- taking devices that measure aspects of your health in the home, whether it’s an automatic blood pressure cuff or a glucose meter, where that data is then uploaded to the cloud and available to different electronic medical record systems...

(At Numera|Social) we pull information from home healthcare devices from Microsoft HealthVault, and pull information the same way from the variety of devices supported by Numera -- well over 50 devices -- so it makes the process of tracking your progress much easier to have these automated devices.

Why did you choose Seattle?

The big things is we found it easier to attract development talent here in Seattle. There are a huge variety of healthcare technology organizations here in the area and we found that we were more easily recruiting and landing the right sort of technical talent here in Seattle.

We're still hiring, we’ve hired about a dozen or so engineers in the last couple of months to focus on both the Numera business and the Numera|Social business... (They are) people who are already very familiar with FDA-approved devices and HIPAA compliance issues and the unique issues around healthcare technology.

Interview conducted and condensed by Aislyn Greene.