LifeVest Health: workplace wellness startup relocates to Philly from Denver

Corporate wellness incentives are costly – employers spends an average of $521 per employee on wellness incentives, according to a recent study – and aren’t always effective.

A new Philly startup called LifeVest Health believes it has the answer: tie wellness incentives to actual change. With LifeVest, employees have “stock” that’s tied to their health. If an employee’s blood pressure goes down, his stock goes up. If his blood pressure goes up, his stock goes down and that money is distributed among the rest of the employees.

The hope, cofounder Mike Logsdon said, is that LifeVest will “revolutionize corporate wellness.”

LifeVest, which relocated from Denver, Co. to Princeton, N.J. for a health accelerator called TigerLabs Health in January 2013, offers a biometric scanning software that tracks an employee’s health and provides information on conditions. For example, if an employee’s blood pressure goes up five points, the software might provide information on hypertension.

The company is running a few pilots right now, Logsdon said, and has paying customers that will being using the program in 2014. Its customers are self-insured companies from all over the country that range in size from a few hundred employees to more than 5,000 employees.

LifeVest’s lead investor is health IT veteran Jeff Margolis, who founded Denver-based health IT company Trizetto Group. LifeVest CEO Jon Cooper actually developed the idea for the company while working at Trizetto Group.

After its stint at TigerLabs, the three-person LifeVest team decide to move to Philadelphia because of the growing health IT sector, Logsdon said. Now headquartered at Rittenhouse Square coworking space Benjamin’s Desk, the team also has Philly roots: Logsdon and Cooper are both Penn grads.

Cooper, 32, currently lives in Princeton but is searching for a home in Philadelphia.