Healthcare : Innovation + Job News

Sansoro Health, a Minneapolis-based electronic health records startup, has had a pretty good month. The company announced earlier this week that it had raised approximately $1.2 million in seed capital, including a substantial sum from TreeHouse Health, a health tech incubator on Loring Park.
 
Healthy Ventures, a San Francisco-based health tech fund, led the seed round. The fund’s involvement is a clear vote of confidence not just for Sansoro Health’s innovative EHR solution, but also or the state of MSP’s medtech industry in general.
 
“The seamless clinical data exchange between EMR [EHR] platforms and digital health vendors is critically important to achieving better health outcomes,” enthused Anya Schiess, Healthy Ventures general partner, in a statement announcing the round’s closing. “Sansoro Health’s real-time integration software bridges the gap to improve patient care.”
 
And the feeling was mutual. “We are proud to have the support of investors like Healthy Ventures who share our vision for EMR integration,” added Jeremy Edes Pierotti, Sansoro Health’s CEO. “We’ve had strong revenue since inception, which enabled us to bootstrap our development. This funding will allow us to further empower innovation by providers, payers, and digital health pioneers.”
 
Sansoro Health isn’t unique in its ability to bootstrap (until now). But it’s one more data point in favor of the argument that healthcare funders, including local players like TreeHouse and Bay Area guns like Healthy Ventures, are taking a more conservative approach in a capital-raising market that many impartial observers believe is overheated. When the smart money gets conservative, companies that can demonstrate their market potential — ideally, by pointing to balance sheets with real revenue from real clients — tend to come out ahead.
 
And a more measured funding landscape is good for MSP companies in general. Though data is sparse, Minnesota companies enjoy a longstanding reputation for prudent, iterative governance — a disadvantage when funders are all about flashy “next big things,” but a pronounced benefit during pullbacks.
 
And what about Sansoro Health, specifically? The company came into its seed round with a healthy head of steam. Healthcare Informatics, a noted industry publication, selected Sansoro as one of six “up and comers” for 2016 — a prestigious honor that the company is understandably touting left and right. It also won Venture+ Forum’s 2016 startup competition at this year’s Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Annual Conference.
 

Player’s Health, a sports medicine startup based out of COCO’s Northeast Minneapolis hub, has made quite a name for itself in the short time it’s been in Minnesota. Last week, the company earned top prize at Google Demo Day, arguably the United States’ most visible startup pitch competition. Though the award itself doesn’t have a monetary component, more than 100 Silicon Valley financiers attend Demo Day each year, and the event is widely regarded as one of the world’s best places to raise startup capital.
 
Case in point: according to the Star Tribune, more than 100 Silicon Valley-based investment firms listened to this year’s 11 pitches.
 
Though Player’s Health hasn’t raised any funding off the award yet, there’s plenty of opportunity in the weeks ahead. AOL founder and former CEO Steve Case has pledged to personally give $100,000 to any finalist that raises $1 million within 100 days of Demo Day. Player’s Health has a head start: It’s currently in the midst of its first major fundraising push, slated to continue through the spring.
 
Founded by Chicago native and former pro football player Tyrre Burks, Player’s Health uses data to make youth sports safer for kids, less worrisome for parents, and less logistically challenging for coaches and school systems. The company’s signature solution is a HIPAA-compliant platform that builds and stores complete player profiles for youth sports participants.
 
These profiles contain a stunning breadth of information: not just personal health data, but also the type of field each kid plays on, the type of equipment used, where injuries occur and more. Over the long term, Burks hopes to tap an ever-growing body of injury data to produce targeted insights about where, how and why injuries occur. School systems and non-academic sports leagues can then use those insights to mitigate injury risk and ensure injured athletes recover properly.
 
“We manage not just injury, but record proper diagnosis and when patients can come back,” Burks told the Star Tribune. He saw his promising football career cut short by injury. “We need an app that collects this info to better understand the environment and how to make it safer.”
 
Player’s Health’s platform won’t be fully operational until June, when it begins tracking player injuries as they occur. But that hasn’t stopped Player’s Health from lining up a host of clients from Minnesota and surrounding states — including Minneapolis’ Homegrown Lacrosse, a youth lacrosse league.
 

Barely six months after its launch, Minneapolis women’s health startup Ova Woman is taking the reins as a national thought leader on issues routinely — and entirely without justification — dismissed as taboo.
 
Elise Maxwell, Ova Woman founder and CEO (and full-time Carlson School of Management MBA student), calls Ova Woman “the [country’s] only comprehensive, puberty-to-post-menopause women’s health e-commerce community.”
 
Maxwell is funding Ova Woman with the proceeds from two entrepreneurship competitions — $5,000 from the 2015 Acara Challenge and $31,000 from the 2015 MN Cup — and a $5,000 Sands Fellowship grant. According to remarks at October’s Minnesota Venture Conference, she’s targeting a $500,000 raise by June of 2016 and $1.6 million by the end of 2017.
 
Ova Woman publishes a lively mix of frank, useful content through four professional, if not always polished, channels: the Ova Vlog, a video blog usually featuring Maxwell and at least one friend or colleague; Your Questions, Our Answers, an in-depth question-and-answer resource with input from clinicians; Ova Stories, a long-form content portal; and The Speculum podcast, which “explores different intimate health issues,” says Maxwell.
 
Ova Woman is unsparing in its treatment of taboo topics. The inaugural Speculum podcast, for instance, devotes more than 20 minutes to the topic of douching; the second gives similar play to genital exams and anatomical awareness.
 
Maxwell wants to turn Ova Woman into an authoritative resource for fact-based information about women’s health, including potentially embarrassing issues that many refrain from discussing in public.
 
When it comes to women’s health issues, “[t]rust shouldn’t just mean a medical practitioner’s voice,” says Maxwell. “Other women’s opinions and experiences are valuable as well.”
 
Maxwell stresses that Ova Woman’s content isn’t meant to replace or counterbalance clinical advice. In the short term, her aim is to create a friendly, useful portal that offers actionable advice: a crowd-sourced alternative to WebMD.
 
Ova Woman’s longer-term plan — and the reason for its ambitious fundraising goal — is to build out a comprehensive retail platform with common and lesser-known products for a wide range of women’s health needs. There’s a huge market to reach: More than 100 million U.S. women experience incontinence, painful intercourse or period leaks, according to Ova Woman.
 
Ova Woman won’t manufacture its own products, at least to start. Instead, Maxwell plans to aggregate the best women’s health gear on the market for sale on its website, along with detailed, unbiased educational material, reviews and testimonials culled from a growing network of Ova Woman product testers: a cross between Amazon and Consumer Reports, with a laser focus on women’s health.
 
If Ova Woman’s retailing efforts are successful, says Maxwell, the company may launch its own white label — literally stamping its seal of approval on the best women’s health products available.
 

Bringing a new medical device to market is a costly, time-consuming process. Innovations that seem like a slam dunk in the research lab often turn out not to work as intended during development. Clinical trials require minute, painstaking attention to detail. Federal regulators, understandably, demand proof that any new device is reasonably safe and works as its manufacturer claims. Each of these steps requires adequate funding and skilled manpower.
 
At the end of it all, Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance firms must be willing to reimburse providers that use the device. With rare exceptions, devices that don’t qualify for reimbursement—a highly complex consideration—fail to find traction in the market.
 
“Even with unlimited funding, it can take two years or more to complete the process for relatively simple medical devices,” says FocusStart founder and CEO Dr. Daniel Sigg.
 
Sigg and FocusStart co-founder Peter DeLange, who previously ran a successful medical device startup called Devicix (recently purchased by Nortech Systems, a local medical engineering company), had each spent years searching for a better early-stage device development model. When they met a few years back, they quickly realized their professional skills complemented each other.
 
So they founded FocusStart, a St. Paul startup that shepherds promising medical technologies through the tricky testing and development phase, refines validated devices for commercialization, and seeks strategic partners (typically multinationals) to complete the regulatory approval process and actually bring devices to market. FocusStart’s model is less capital-intensive than traditional medical device development models, though the company still assumes risk for technologies that don’t pan out during development.
 
FocusStart currently has four promising technologies in its portfolio: a cardiac product that may reduce blood clot risk following certain surgical procedures; a urological catheter that may reduce the risk of certain infections; a “smart” respiratory inhaler; and a “tissue tension sensor” that may promote better outcomes following partial and total knee replacement procedures.
 
Sigg and the team are devoting substantial energy and attention to the tissue tension sensor, which is capable of directly measuring ligament tension without requiring an invasive cut. Direct measurement enables surgeons to properly “balance” the knee during the replacement procedure, reducing the likelihood of complications or outright failure.
 
The sensor could potentially benefit other orthopedic procedures, such as rotator cuff and ACL surgeries, though FocusStart is concentrating on knee replacement for now. According to Sigg, it also has potential as a training tool for newer surgeons, who lack the intuitive “feel” of more experienced operators.
 
Although each technology is different, FocusStart’s development approach is fairly standardized. First, the company approaches a research institution to work out a licensing agreement for the technology. FocusStart works with the University of Minnesota, Mayo Clinic, the University of Zurich (in Switzerland) and an Israeli inventor.
 
“We quickly found that these agreements are fairly standard, with some variation,” says Sigg.
 
FocusStart generally would pay a royalty on future sales of the product, possibly with an equity component to sweeten the deal for the institution should the technology find its way into a marketable device.
 
“We find it easier to develop relationships locally,” says Sigg, adding that his Swiss background (he grew up in Switzerland and attended medical school at the University of Basel) probably helped with the Zurich partnership.
 
FocusStart’s lean model helps, too. “Once [our partners] understood our approach, we become more successful in finding very interesting technologies,” says Sigg. And the combined expertise of the firm’s principals—Sigg was a board-certified anesthesiologist and subsequently amassed almost two decades of medical research and development experience, while DeLange had the business chops to build Devicix into a successful concern and boasts insider knowledge of the medical device field—doesn’t hurt.
 
But that doesn’t mean swift success is assured. FocusStart has been “fortunate” to receive National Institutes of Health grants during the early going, but the company continues to seek government grants and private funding—a process that will likely continue as Sigg and DeLange seek out and develop promising new technologies.
 
There’s no such thing as a perfect batting record in the medical device business. “As we do our own work, we may find challenges or problems that weren’t apparent previously,” says Sigg. “Occasionally, you have to know when to say ‘that’s it’ and walk away [from a technology].”
 

Healthcare spending accounts for a huge chunk of national GDP. And with dozens of major providers, insurers and medical device companies headquartered in and around MSP, the sector is absolutely critical for the local economy.
 
But the healthcare industry is notoriously inefficient. “Up to 30 percent of every dollar spent on healthcare is wasted due to unnecessary variations in care,” says Patrick Yoder, founder and CEO of LogicStream Health.
 
Yoder and LogicStream co-founder Dan Rubin want to bring healthcare delivery into the 21st century by making hospitals, clinics and individual medical professionals smarter about the care they provide.
 
Dozens of hospitals around the country believe in LogicStream’s solutions. Fairview, one of MSP’s largest hospital systems, is a current client; so is Yale-New Haven, a prestigious East Coast provider. LogicStream has nearly 500 ambulatory (walk-in) clinics in its system, too; not bad for a company that got its start just two years ago and still offices out of TreeHouse Health, a downtown Minneapolis healthcare business incubator.
 
LogicStream is built around the aptly named LogicStream Intelligence Platform, an algorithmic “learning system built for standardization,” as Yoder described it in an October 1 presentation at the MN Venture Conference. The goal of the LogicStream Intelligence Platform is to “improve clinical quality, provider satisfaction and cost efficiencies throughout the enterprise [while reducing or even eliminating] some critical hospital acquired conditions,” according to the company’s website.
 
While the technical aspects of LogicStream’s platform are complex, the gist is simple: It runs the huge amounts of data generated by each patient’s journey through the hospital or ambulatory clinic through a constantly evolving algorithm that spots trends and develops “rigid, clinically appropriate” (in other words, medically sound) protocols to reduce the risk of complications or waste.
 
LogicStream’s platform is designed to develop protocols rapidly, without hands-on human guidance. The platform’s speed and accuracy allows it to cover potentially thousands of life-threatening conditions that can affect hospital and clinic patients.
 
One early success: venous thromboembolism, a common clotting condition responsible for thousands of hospital deaths each year. According to a LogicStream case study, one client “reduced the rate of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in post-surgical patients by more than 80%, resulting in a significant overall decline in associated morbidity and mortality and $1.1M in cost savings.”
 
Yoder notes that, in most cases, reducing VTE risk is straightforward: Upon admission, “a patient’s care team needs to assess his or her individual risk for clots,” he says, not rely on statistical data that may not be relevant to the situation. LogicStream’s VTE protocols include an individual risk assessment; most electronic health records (EHRs), which clinicians use to track patient data and monitor condition changes, don’t.
 
As more clients discover LogicStream’s solution, Yoder expects the LogicStream Intelligence Platform to scale rapidly. At MN Venture, he projected three- to four-fold growth in total protocol content between Q3 2015 and Q1 2017, a huge boost to the platform’s power and reach. The company currently has 12 employees, and that count is likely to increase through 2016.
 
Job Listings
 

1. Executive Vice President of Sales, Minneapolis (downtown)

 
 

Medical cannabis or marijuana officially became legal statewide on July 1, with MSP quickly emerging as the de facto hub for sales and cultivation. Two MSP-area companies, Minnesota Medical Solutions (MinnMed) and LeafLine Labs, are leading the way.
 
According to the Minnesota Department of Health, more than 200 healthcare practitioners were certified to recommend patients for medical marijuana during the first month of registrations. About 100 patients are certified to purchase medical marijuana statewide, though that number is expected to increase as the state works through its backlog of patient applications and more providers come online.
 
MinnMed’s flagship clinic, where medical marijuana cardholders can purchase cannabis oil and other derivatives, recently moved into the old League of Catholic Women space in downtown Minneapolis. LeafLine’s first clinic is located in suburban Eagan.
 
Each organization plans three more dispensaries around the state: MinnMed in Moorhead, Rochester and Eden Prairie; LeafLine in St. Paul, St. Cloud and Hibbing. LeafLine grows its product at a tightly controlled, 24-acre facility in suburban Cottage Grove, while MinnMed works a state-of-the-art greenhouse complex in rural Otsego.
 
Combined, LeafLine and MinnMed have already raised about $30 million in venture capital funding, with more potentially in the works. But with some of the nation’s most restrictive medical cannabis laws here in Minnesota, it could be a while before funders see a return on their investment. Unlike California, Colorado, Washington State and other pro-cannabis states, Minnesota — even liberal MSP — won’t have ostentatious storefront dispensaries or open-to-the-public cannabis clubs anytime soon.
 
‘‘The [national] industry doesn’t do it this way,’’ MinnMed principal Dr. Kyle Kingsley said in a recent interview with the Boston Globe. ‘‘It’s all new.’’
 
The law also sets strict qualifying standards for prospective patients. Patients need to demonstrate — and healthcare providers must confirm — that their conditions are truly debilitating or life threatening. Qualifying conditions include glaucoma; Crohn’s disease; cancer or cancer treatment associated with nausea, vomiting, wasting and/or severe pain; HIV/AIDS; seizure disorders; severe muscle spasms, such as caused by multiple sclerosis; ALS; and Tourette’s Syndrome.
 
To promote safer modes of ingestion and prevent patients from smoking their medicine, Minnesota’s law forbids direct sales of plant material. Instead, producers are required to extract the plant’s active ingredients, condensing them into potent oils that can be incorporated into pill capsules, oral sprays, tinctures, suspensions and oils designed to be heated, vaporized and inhaled.
 
Dosages vary between and within each mode. Both MinnMed and LeafLife offer detailed dosing instructions to patients and healthcare providers, with MinnMed advocating a “start low, go slow” approach for patients unfamiliar with marijuana’s effects. Over time, each patient is encouraged to develop a customized dosing regimen in consultation with their healthcare provider.
 
“Different patients have different needs, and there are a lot of compounds in cannabis that are helpful to patients,” said Kingsley in a recent interview with KSTP. “[W]e want to...make these medications for specific patients.”
 
 

 
Rising costs and inconvenient delivery modes beset healthcare consumers. Thompson Aderinkomi, a trained economist with an MBA from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Business, has a novel solution.
 
His new startup, Retrace Health, offers at-home, on-demand consultations and care from licensed doctors and nurse practitioners, either by videoconference or in-person visit.
 
Retrace has grown rapidly since its late 2013 launch, when the company had a roster of about 40 patients, mostly Aderinkomi’s friends and family members. The company began accepting corporate clients in June 2014: Aderinkomi now counts at least seven client companies, ranging in size from a few hundred to a few thousand employees, whose employees can tap Retrace’s services. Between individual and corporate clients, Retrace now brokers “double-digit weekly consultation counts,” says Aderinkomi.
 
According to Aderinkomi, convenience — the fact that patients don’t have to drive to a clinic or hospital and sit in a waiting room for hours on end — is a huge factor in Retrace’s success. “We’ve found that once people try Retrace and realize how seamless the process can be, they use us more than they’d use a regular doctor or care provider,” says Aderinkomi.
 
Retrace’s doctors and NPs keep longer hours than a typical health clinic. Video consults are available 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Mondays, and 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. In-person consults occur from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday.
 
For simple issues, users can schedule a three-minute video consultation and be on their way. For more complex problems, a 30- or 60-minute home visit may be necessary. Retrace’s care providers can schedule same-day appointments with as little as 60 minutes’ notice, though off-hours requests need to wait until the following business day.
 
Retrace users also value the company’s untimed appointments. Whereas a traditional clinic might schedule 15 or 20 daily appointments per doctor or NP, Retrace’s care providers don’t have such heavy workloads. A lighter workload allows care providers to linger longer with each patient, answering questions and addressing issues that might normally get pushed aside due to time constraints.
 
Financially, Retrace isn’t out of reach for most patients. Individual patients who want to pay through their insurance provider (Retrace works with most providers) don’t have to pay anything to use the service, aside from premiums and co-pays set by their providers.
 
Individual patients who don’t want to tap their insurance providers can choose from three packages: Basic, Premium and Unlimited. Basic, which doesn’t come with an annual fee, requires users to pay a la carte for labs, visits and other services. (For instance, an in-home X-ray costs $150). Premium and Unlimited come with respective annual fees of $99 and $599; costs for visits and services are reduced or waived altogether. (Corporate prices are customized based on the client’s employee count and other factors.)
 
Retrace’s simple pricing scheme is a breath of fresh air in a healthcare sector that famous for confusing statements and wildly variable prices. “We’re huge believers in price transparency and simplicity,” says Aderinkomi. “Customers have a right to know upfront how much they’re paying for their care.”
 
And not everyone is bound by Retrace’s standard prices. The company’s “original 40” patients got a sweetheart deal in exchange for their faith in the company: An all-inclusive lifetime membership for a one-time fee of $300. That deal, unfortunately, is off the table, replaced by a limited-time promotion that waives all visit and lab fees for 12 months with the payment of an annual membership fee.
 

 
Kari Severson, a Minneapolis-based inventor and entrepreneur, has a fun, healthy, ultra-connected solution for sedentary office workers: the Walkway Workstation, a “treadmill desk designed with the purposeful user in mind.” On March 2, Severson and her team of contract designers and developers celebrated Walkway’s official launch at Startup Venture Loft (SVL), a North Loop coworking space and startup incubator.
 
SVL will permanently feature at least one Walkway desk, a high-visibility win for Severson’s health-and-productivity startup.
 
“We’re thrilled to have the support of Startup Venture Loft’s tenants and management,” says Severson, a self-professed fitness enthusiast who juggles a full-time job at United Health Group with her entrepreneurial duties at Walkway. “It’s gratifying to see people embracing the Walkway concept so enthusiastically.”
 
Walkway Workstation also recently announced a partnership with MSP International Airport. Severson’s team will deliver two Walkways to Concourse C, near gate C21, and one to Concourse F, near gate F3. More could follow in other locations this year or next.
 
The airport partnership is apt. Severson first came up with the idea for Walkway during a hectic, travel-heavy period in her life. Because her boyfriend was enrolled in graduate school at the University of California Los Angeles, and Severson had a full-time job in MSP and was pursuing master’s program Duke University in North Carolina, she was constantly crisscrossing the country.
 
“With all the travel and a generally unpredictable schedule, I found myself really inactive,” she says. She came up with a concept that improved upon existing treadmill desks, which didn’t feature the amenities or built-in controls that would eventually adorn the Walkway.
 
Each Walkway is a self-contained unit equipped with a sturdy treadmill, ample desk space, device charging ports and a free Internet hotspot. The treadmill’s speed is capped at two miles per hour, a relatively leisurely pace that facilitates multitasking and doesn’t tire out users too quickly. The setup is ideal for individual offices, common areas in open-plan workplaces, waiting rooms and institutional public spaces, says Severson.
 
“The goal is to make everyday lifestyle resources available to busy people,” she says, “and to seamlessly facilitate healthy choices in a convenient setting.”
 
Severson offers several different Walkway configurations, each ideal for a particular end-user. A light-duty treadmill base is ideal for home offices and small workplaces; a moderate-duty base works better in medium-sized, collaborative workplaces; and a heavy-duty treadmill supports near-constant use at large corporate offices, and airports and other public spaces. Each version comes with the user’s choice of a manually or electronically adjustable desk.
 
Though individual buyers and small offices can purchase Walkways at market price, Severson’s team seeks sponsorships to subsidize the cost of units in heavily trafficked public spaces. In effect, each public Walkway is an interactive billboard; sponsors pay for customized user interfaces and prominent, outward-facing logo displays visible to anyone who walks by.
 
And a lot of people can walk by: According to Walkway’s website, about 26,000 people per day walk by the company’s two MSP airport sites.
 
Severson is looking at other revenue-generation ideas, too, including a “freemium” model that offers free access for an initial period, and then imposes a per-minute or per-hour rate for continued use. She’s also mulling partnerships with content providers to deliver premium music and video to users willing to pay a fee for the service.
 
Severson is also keen on the concept of “Walkway pods,” which would feature two, three or more Walkways facing one another — good for “walking meetings” and other collaborative activities, she says.
 

For most people, a diabetes diagnosis is a wake-up call. For WholeMe co-founders Mary Kosir and Krista Steinbach, it was a business opportunity.

In the mid-2000s, Kosir’s husband developed adult-onset Type I diabetes—an unusual, but not totally unheard of, condition that progresses differently than the age-related insulin resistance we know as Type II diabetes.

The news forced the family to eliminate gluten, grains, and most dairy products from its diet. Kosir embraced the new restrictions, sharing experimental cereal and bar recipes with friends, neighbors, and associates at her local CrossFit gym.

That’s where she met Steinbach, the former pastry chef at Minneapolis’ Bachelor Farmer. Steinbach was coming off a lifestyle change of her own: In 2011, she’d competed in (and won) a 30-day “food challenge” that required contestants to eliminate refined sugar, gluten, grains, and certain other substances from their diets. By the contest’s end date, her chronic gastrointestinal issues had vanished and her energy levels were higher than they’d been in years.

“The challenge taught me how much food impacted my daily life,” she says, “and pushed me to learn more about nutrition.”

The two women had a lot in common, so they officially joined forces in early 2013. Kosir’s first creation, the energy-dense DateMe bar, was already making waves—“Everyone was telling me to start selling them,” she says—but Steinbach brought years of culinary expertise to the table. In addition to the DateMe bar, the duo created the WakeMe cocoa bar and EatMe cereal.

And so WholeMe was born. Thanks to their CrossFit connections, the co-founders had a ready-made market of active, health-conscious clients. Kosir and Steinbach also have stocking arrangements with gyms across the metro area, and they’re looking to find other places, like yoga studios and food co-ops, that attract a similar clientele. “We want to be closer to our customers,” says Steinbach, not tucked away on a shelf at a big-box store.

WholeMe’s bars and cereals are made from whole foods that haven’t been treated or altered in any way. “Our goal is to create relatively simple products where taste comes first,” says Kosir. “At the same time, we need to be mindful of what we’re putting in our bodies.” She’s quick to note, wryly, that WholeMe’s only preservative “is a refrigerator.”

Kosir and Steinbach think they’ve found a sweet spot for their products. “There’s lots of room to grow in this segment,” says Kosir. Many “healthy” foods don’t taste very good, she argues, and most tasty foods aren’t that healthy.

The two women hope WholeMe’s simple promise—healthy, delicious food for all—resonates beyond Minnesota’s borders. Less than a year after their official launch, they’ve already shipped to gyms and stores in North Carolina, California, and Hawaii. Their burgeoning e-store puts the rest of the world at their fingertips. In March, they hope to make some new friends at the Natural Foods Expo West in Anaheim, California.

It doesn’t hurt that they have a cheeky, catchy brand campaign and an experienced chef. They plan to expand their “gear concept” with more merchandise options, like T-shirts and hats, says Kosir. They expect WholeMe’s “beta testing” arm, branded NewMe, to produce seasonal or limited-release products exclusively for online sale. If a NewMe creation is well received, says Steinbach, it could become a permanent addition to the lineup.

Ultimately, Kosir and Steinbach would like to see WakeMe, DateMe, and EatMe—and whatever else they dream up—in the likes of Whole Foods, Lund’s, and Byerly’s.

Their ambition doesn’t come cheap. To cover their travel expenses and fund WholeMe’s ongoing expansion, they’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign that aims to raise $40,000 by February 24. To encourage participation, Kosir and Steinbach plan to give donors dibs on the first-ever NewMe creation.

Source: Mary Kosir
Writer: Brian Martucci

Patients at risk for heart disease know they need to eat better, but cooking nutritious meals is time-consuming. Also, truly beneficial foods often don’t taste very good unless they’re well prepared. According to Dr. Elizabeth Klodas, a practicing cardiologist, her new company Truhealth MD aims to solve both issues.

Truhealth MD is a Minneapolis company whose four employees manufacture and market its line of health food products. The company’s offerings include heart-healthy pancakes, oatmeal, bars, smoothie mixes, and “anytime sprinkles”—fiber-rich flakes that mix well with yogurt, fruit, and granola.

“[In large part], heart disease is a nutrition-related problem,” says Dr. Klodas. After 18 years as a cardiologist, she’s identified four common nutrients that at-risk patients often lack: antioxidants, omega-3 acids, fiber and phytosterols, a broad class of steroid that may lower “bad” cholesterol.

The trick, she says, is “supplying clinically meaningful amounts of these nutrients in a delicious package…and turn every meal into a therapeutic intervention.” While other “healthy” foods, like FiberOne cereal and Clif bars, may contain sufficient doses of fiber and omega-3 acids, few contain significant quantities of phytosterols. This is largely an issue of ingredient cost, says Klodas, and it’s a major point of distinction for her products.

Meanwhile, the taste issue basically solves itself. “We tend to forget that real, wholesome, nutritious foods actually taste good,” says Dr. Klodas. 

Many of the company’s customers report impressive reductions in their LDL and triglyceride readings within weeks of beginning a twice-a-day regimen.

Robert Kirscht, a Twin Cities-based sales director in his late 40s, is a typical case. Kirscht’s job duties—“I’m traveling and entertaining clients about half the time,” he says—make it difficult to eat right or exercise regularly. A family history of heart disease doesn’t help either. Last spring, his longtime physician confronted him with an especially bleak blood-work report and issued an ultimatum: Take a cholesterol-lowering statin drug or else.

“I wasn’t comfortable with that choice,” says Kirscht. “So I asked for 30 days.” He started using Truhealth’s products—“I usually sprinkle the ‘anytime flakes’ on my granola [in the morning] and have a cranberry or chocolate bar in the afternoon,” he says—and began to feel better almost immediately.

When he returned the next month for a round of follow-up tests, Kirscht’s doctor was thoroughly impressed. Among the highlights: his triglyceride reading dropped from 150 to 99, his LDL dropped from 155 to 118, and his HDL rose from 45 to 53. The only drawback, he says, is that he has to hide his “delicious” stash from his two teenage daughters.

Truhealth MD’s products aren’t endorsed by the FDA, and Dr. Klodas stresses that they’re just one component of a healthy lifestyle—albeit a powerful one.

Patients who truly commit to cooking heart-healthy meals, exercising regularly, and making other smart choices, says Dr. Klodas, may see even better results than Truhealth’s meal-replacement regimen can promise. “But those people are rare,” she adds. “[Our products] make dietary advice actionable…and help our customers think about what other lifestyle decisions they might be making.”

What types of decisions? Consider a hypothetical customer who, every day for a solid year, replaces a plain bagel and Snickers bar with single servings of Truhealth pancakes and chocolate bars. To absorb comparable amounts of phytosterols and antioxidants, said customer would need to consume a ton of broccoli and 150 pounds of kale over the same period. For many, that’s not an appetizing prospect.

After all, says Dr. Klodas, “Who wants to eat 150 pounds of kale?”

Source: Dr. Elizabeth Klodas, Truhealth MD
Writer: Brian Martucci

The Twin Cities is home to a diverse arts and healing community – perhaps the largest nationwide, according to Jack Becker, who leads Forecast Public Art, a nonprofit public art consulting agency based in Saint Paul.

The Twin Cities, Becker adds, is “an arts-rich community, and we’re huge for healthcare and technologies devoted to medicine and bioscience and research into healing. These realms come together in a variety of ways.” 

Those intersections are the subject of an exhibit Forecast put together in collaboration with Hennepin County’s Multicultural Arts Committee. Titled "Creative Care: Art + Healing in the Twin Cities," the exhibition is at the Hennepin County Government Center’s gallery in downtown Minneapolis through Jan. 29.

The exhibition pulls together visuals from nine arts-healing organizations in the area. In addition, an opening celebration today, and related forums and performances, are in the works for the coming weeks. 

The exhibiton is “about the idea that art can have healing benefits,” Becker says, a notion that often goes unacknowledged in daily life.
 
As a part of the kickoff for "Creative Care," which begins at 11 a.m., representatives from the exhibiting organizations will be on hand. Some groups, including Illusion Theater, Hopewell Community Choir, and Wilder Band will also perform at the event while county commissioner Peter McLaughlin will make an appearance and T. Mychael Rambo will serve as its emcee. 

The show represents all different approaches to art and healing, from Hennepin County Medical Center’s Inspire Arts program to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum’s Healing Arts Therapies.  

As such, the displays are just as diverse as the participants. People can meander through a labyrinth on the floor -- a meditative intentional walk on a path that leads to peaceful calm in the center-- or view snapshots, paintings, installations, and more.  

For those who are sick or depressed or are facing other challenges, art can “focus the mind for a period of time on something other than the problem, the ailment, the pain,” Becker says, and art does so in a holistic way. He adds that art can come in the form of a relaxing piece of music or a public memorial in a war-torn community, as just a couple of examples.  

Forecast also published a related directory that includes 40 local art-healing programs in order to “raise awareness and increase access to these programs,” he says. 

Source: Jack Becker, executive director, Forecast Public Art 
Writer: Anna Pratt 

TreeHouse Health, an “innovation center” with an emphasis on healthcare IT and care coordination, opened its doors on Oct. 17. 

The idea behind the for-profit “innovation center,” based in Minneapolis's Loring Park neighborhood, is to help emerging, and larger more established healthcare companies, grow and solve industry issues, the TreeHouse website states. 

TreeHouse is in a position to do so, thanks to its six partners with extensive expertise in healthcare and investment. 

Jeffrey (J.D.) Blank, the company’s managing director, says TreeHouse can offer networking opportunities, office space, cash for startups, and other resources. Blank’s dad is Dr. John Blank, TreeHouse’s chairman of the board, who is also the president of Dalmore Investments, an angel fund in Minneapolis. “We offer access to customers, make introductions, allow them to leverage the relationships of our partners,” says J.D. Blank.      

Collaboration is key, he says. "We view an 'innovation center' as an ecosystem, an environment that supports entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, the innovators within a larger organization.” 

“We’re hoping to get small and large companies from every sector of healthcare,” all of which bring different views to solve healthcare issues, he says. “The industry is so broad and complicated that we think having every angle represented, creating a 360-degree ecosystem will help parties navigate the challenges.” 

Creating that ecosystem means “getting the right companies with the right mindset, that are willing to collaborate and contribute to the ecosystem at large,” he adds. 

As such, TreeHouse intends to cultivate a network of service providers and business professionals that can offer support to companies. TreeHouse intends to bring companies into the fold for six months to two years. “We think companies will see the value in it,” he says. 

Already, TreeHouse has signed on RiverSystems LLC, a startup that developed HomeStream, “a tool comprised of easy-to-use, computer-assisted capabilities designed to improve the quality of life for seniors and aging baby boomers,” a prepared statement reads. 
 

Source: Jeffrey (J.D.) Blank, managing director, TreeHouse Health 
Writer: Anna Pratt 

Minneapolis health and medical marketing agency StoneArch unveiled an iPad-based mobile selling platform designed for medical device manufacturers and their sales forces.
 
The platform, dubbed VOLLEY, was developed in response to an observed need, according to company president Jessica Boden.
 
"Most of our clients are medical device manufacturers, and they depend on their direct sales forces to sell their products," she says. "When the iPad launched, the medical device industry was an early adopter, but because they lacked a strong platform for the industry specifically, the devices became more like toys than tools."
 
StoneArch brought together a cross-functional team to address the issue, and ended up with its first proprietary application, which launched on Oct. 16th.
 
VOLLEY allows for customized content across diverse target audiences, and features a sales rep coaching tool that can help reps deal with challenging customer situations. Use of the application also comes with StoneArch support, including training and deployment, and the agency offers rental iPads for small and mid-sized companies.
 
Boden says that VOLLEY is already being well received in the industry, and the agency is planning its next iteration after getting feedback from users. The project hasn't just filled a need in the marketplace, either--it's also created some new bounce at StoneArch.
 
"It's been really fun to develop this; the organization has gotten energy out of making it happen," Boden says. "It gives us fuel for thinking about other ways we can use innovation to help our clients accomplish more."
 
Source: Jessica Boden, StoneArch
Writer: Elizabeth Millard
 
 

Apps can help track stocks, monitor the weather, arrange a yoga sequence, organize business contacts, and just about any other task you might imagine. But the Mayo Clinic has unveiled an app that does more than provide time management: it helps users deal with anxiety issues.
 
Called Anxiety Coach, the app is available on iTunes for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices, and is aimed at reducing worry for its users. Through a series of exercises, users can track their anxiety levels and determine their own progress in handling fears and agitation. Even if someone has a lower-level anxiety, such as fear of public speaking, the app can be helpful in minimizing the impact of those reactions.
 
The Mayo Clinic emphasizes that the app isn't meant to substitute for mental health services, but simply serves as a way to reduce anxiety between health care visits, or to address fears in general.
 
Developed by two clinical psychologists--Dr. Stephen Whiteside at the Mayo Clinic and Dr. Jonathan Abramowitz at the University of North Carolina--the app relies on cognitive behavioral therapy, which assists people in overcoming anxiety by gradual degrees.
 
In addition to a short test to measure severity of worries and fears, the app contains more than 500 activities related to specific fears, obsessions, panic attacks, social anxiety, compulsion, and trauma-related anxiety.
 
Dr. Whiteside notes that the app challenges people to face their fears, as opposed to other apps that tend to focus on relaxation strategies. Those types of apps "don't get the core of what is helpful in the long term," he says.
 
Source: Stephen Whiteside, Mayo Clinic
Writer: Elizabeth Millard

Healthcare administration can be notoriously complicated, but Minneapolis-based ABILITY Network is determined to untangle the process.
 
The company, originally called Visionshare, initially provided only network connectivity for Medicare providers. But in the last few years, a major rebranding initiative brought in a larger management team, strategic investors, and a significantly revamped lineup of products and services.
 
ABILITY now provides workflow management services, cash flow tools, payer eligibility verification, and a secure claims submission solution, among other products.
 
"We're a company that just used to handle bits and bytes, and through that process, we earned the trust of providers across the country," says Mark Briggs, CEO of ABILITY. "Now, they've turned to us to deliver solutions that lead to better patient care."
 
Since its rebranding, the company has found itself on a robust growth track, both in hiring and sales. With 150 employees, ABILITY is likely to keep expanding, and recently opened an office in Tampa, with plans to open another in Boston. The new offices are part of a strategic hiring push, since software engineers can be difficult to find in the "silicon prairie" of the Twin Cities.
 
Providers who need software and services that give them more control over areas like revenue management and medical coding are driving the company's continued growth, Briggs notes. 
 
"We're helping providers do a better job by uniting all the pieces of a patient's chart, and letting them streamline clinical information," he says. "What we provide is an ability to put relevant content to work. We really think there couldn't be a better time in our country's healthcare system for tools like these. Definitely, there's a need."
 
Source: Mark Briggs, ABILITY Network
Writer: Elizabeth Millard