Emerging Health Innovation Hubs in America’s Heartland

Published in

StartUp Health

8 min readNov 5, 2019

We’re used to seeing coastal cities like NYC and SF top the charts for most-funded health innovation cities. But a new Milwaukee-Madison tech corridor and steady flows of healthtech funding in Chicago and Columbus are putting the Midwest on the map as a heartland of health innovation.

Photo of Milwaukee skyline at dusk, by Tom Barrett

Coastal cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco often take the top three slots on StartUp Health’s list of most funded health innovation hubs. However, national changes to the U.S. healthcare system — namely moves to value-based care and reimbursement models — are paving the way, albeit out of necessity, for the rise of the rest. According to the StartUp Health Insights Report for 2019 Q3, Chicago was the fourth most funded U.S. metro area for health innovation with over $350M YTD raised. Columbus took 9th place with $75.2M raised. And a look beyond the numbers reveals an emerging health innovation corridor in Milwaukee and Madison, WI with local health companies and institutions of higher education combining efforts to create communities of leaders dedicated to improving healthcare in the U.S.

“There is a lot of focus in the Milwaukee-Madison corridor,” said Nan Gardetto in StartUp Health Magazine: Issue 4. Gardetto is President of The Every Day Good Foundation, and former CEO of the Wisconsin-based snack company, Gardetto’s (acquired by General Mills). “There’s a huge amount of technology brewing here. The Midwest has a lot to offer and the world has yet to see it.”

Meet the Health Transformers who are transforming the Midwest into the heartland of health innovation.

ILLINOIS

Nancy Koenig

CEO, Caremerge | Illinois

At Caremerge, Koenig is on a mission to ensure the aging experience is filled with peace of mind and joy. For healthcare providers and payers who face increased risk in tracking patients’ wellbeing into post-acute care, Caremerge is a simple care coordination platform that allows all stakeholders to get relevant automated alerts and help intervene in a timely manner for improved outcomes. The company includes caregivers in their solution with a Family Engagement platform that promotes collaboration with families. Unlike traditional population health solutions, Caremerge technology allows users to create rules based on triggers across systems and notifies all necessary stakeholders for timely, exception-based real-time interventions. With over 500 client locations across the United States, Caremerge is on their way to promoting wellness and inspiring collaboration between residents, staff and families in senior living communities.

Message Nancy via email at caremerge@startuphealth.com.

Alex Vealitzek and Jessica Vealitzek

Co-founders, MyPeople Health | Illinois
Alex and Jessica want to lessen the burden of cancer by addressing the risk of the disease upfront. MyPeople Health is the ﬁrst cancer-speciﬁc care management platform focused on prevention and proactive care. For employers that are spending millions of dollars per year on cancer-related medical claims, MyPeople Health’s care management platform drives preventive and proactive care among employees, reducing claim costs and lost productivity. The company addresses specific and complex care management issues, unlike customer service platforms, and they provide a real-time platform built for use by the employee, unlike insurance-based disease management solutions. The result? Happier, healthier, and more productive employees, in addition to millions of dollars of saved by employees on annual medical claims. To date, the company’s platform has supported over $4 million in annual medical claim savings.

Message Alex on StartUp Health HQ or via email at mypeoplehealth@startuphealth.com.

KANSAS

Miguel Johns

Founder & CEO, KingFit | Kansas
“The idea of KingFit was born when my grandmother was diagnosed with diabetes,” Johns. “She thought chocolate milk and orange juice were healthy food options.” At KingFit, Johns is improving health literacy for millions of Spanish speaking patients through educational health videos. The company, working to achieve the Nutrition & Fitness Moonshot, takes written copy and quickly turns it into 55 bite-size diabetes education videos in Spanish that are delivered directly to people with diabetes in Latin America using Facebook Messenger. While Johns initially wanted to transform how diabetes education programs were delivered, he and his team at KingFit have built an app and style of video production that is affordable and relevant for myriad health topics.

Message Miguel Johns via email at kingfit@startuphealth.com.

OHIO

Bill Nordmark

CEO, Aver | Ohio

Aver is on a mission to make value-based healthcare universal by providing a bundled payment analytics software that reduces administrative complexity to improve value-based reimbursement. Rather than focus only on the Bundled Care Program Initiative, at Aver, Nordmark strives to be a technology-first, payor-informed bundled benefits management provider. Aver helps by creating contracts through episode pricing and reconciliation software for value-based contracts focused on the most frequent and costly health care episodes that affect consumers, including knee replacements and bariatric surgery. In 2018, Aver released its Bundle Benefit Management (BBM) platform, which enables health plans to provide episode-based contracts at scale to consumers. In May, 2019, Aver achieved full certification by the Altarum Center for Value in Health Care on version 5.5 of the PROMETHEUS Analytics® methodology.

Message Bill via email at aver@startuphealth.com.

Beth Sanders

Co-Founder, LifeBio | Ohio

At LifeBio, Sanders is on a mission to capture the life stories in healthcare to know who people are, to reduce loneliness, and to transform care for seniors. For senior care and healthcare organizations seeking to improve and measure satisfaction with their patients to meet Medicare requirements, LifeBio’s platform helps people engage and share deeply using reminiscence therapy. LifeBio provides a private, secure platform to store the person’s personal life story and the ability for staff members and family to engage with the platform. LifeBio offers both storytelling and journaling applications that are used in health care. In their work with UnitedHealthcare, results have shown statistically significant improvement in happiness and satisfaction. Currently, the company is supporting the largest reminiscence therapy and life review study with the State of Ohio and the Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging.

Message Beth via email at lifebio@startuphealth.com.

Eugene Malinskiy, Ilya Malinskiy & Daniel Dudley

Founders, Indago | Ohio

The founders of Indago are on a mission to create the operating room of the future through smart surgical tools. With ArthroFree, the world’s first fully wireless minimally-invasive camera, surgeons can navigate the OR unencumbered by unsafe and unwieldy cables. With a proprietary, patent-pending light engine, secure FDA/FCC-approved wireless data transfer, and a custom, ergonomic design created with leading physicians, the company is bringing ORs into the digital age. Indago has two patent applications published in the US, EU, Japan, and China, with an additional five scheduled for publication in the next 18 months. They have also completed the development of the ArthroFree Platform and audited the entire supply chain in preparation for commercial scale production.

Message Eugene Malinskiy, Ilya Malinskiy and Daniel Dudley via email at indago@startuphealth.com.

Meet Health Transformers like these at the StartUp Health Festival. Apply to attend the 8th Annual StartUp Health Festival (Jan 13–14, 2020).

MINNESOTA

Greg Guettler & John Dykstra

Metalogics | Minnesota

After years working with cardiologists on medical devices, Guettler decided to take on the problem of weight loss as an endcap to his career, which has already included starting and leading three companies, two of which went public and later sold. He teamed up with Dykstra and Co-founder James Hill to launch Metalogics and bring to market a device that would finally accurately measure calories in and calories out, giving clinicians the real-time metabolic data they needed to create and manage a personalized weight loss program, monitor adherence, and measure success. The device, called Lume™, is the first consumer device of its kind and is built on a body of research — the team conducted multi-year clinical trials before coming to market. It can accurately predict or measure calorie intake within 40 calories per day — about 2% of the calories consumed for the average person.

Message Greg & John via email at metalogics@startuphealth.com.

Karen Drexler

Co-Founder & CEO, Sandstone Diagnostics | Minnesota

Drexler is on a mission at Sandstone Diagnostics to make blood plasma tests and male fertility tests universally available. For medical diagnostics companies seeking to broaden access and clinical utility of plasma-based lab tests, Sandstone’s Zero-Delay Plasma Separation System is a superior replacement to blood collection tubes that immediately stabilizes pure, cell-free plasma at the point of draw. Sandstone has also designed, built, and commercialized the Trak Male Fertility Testing system, an FDA-cleared device that allows men to stably collect, measure and track sperm count at home. Sandstone currently has 9 patents issued and their Trak system was named #1 best selling new fertility device on Amazon.

Message Karen via email at sandstone@startuphealth.com.

MISSOURI

Linda Van Horn

iShare Medical, Founder & CEO | Missouri

Van Horn believes that US healthcare costs can be reduced by 25%, or $825 billion annually, by sharing medical information and using that information to help detect diseases sooner. The company’s patient identifier, iShareID Direct Address, allows doctors and hospitals to achieve a 100% match on a patient’s identity regardless of care setting, provider, or EHR system. Customers of iShare Medical are able to better access their data, allowing them to support new care and payment modules that will help improve care and outcomes and lower overall cost. Their platform has proven 100% interoperability over an expansive nationwide network, which spans more than 1.7 million healthcare providers from 122,000 health care organizations, exchanging 51.5 million transactions quarterly.

Message Linda Van Horn via email at isharemedical@startuphealth.com.

WISCONSIN

Justin Nicols

CEO, Sift Healthcare | Wisconsin

Sift Healthcare is revolutionizing healthcare payments with AI. For health systems losing revenue due to revenue cycle inefficiencies such as unpaid bills, Sift Healthcare data platform applies predictive analytics and machine learning to all reimbursement and patient pay data streams to enable high-power denials management and propensity-to-pay modeling. In other words, Sift’s platform helps providers better understand patients and collect payments more efficiently by using root cause analysis of denials payer contract variances. Sift is working with an innovative regional health network to apply Sift’s AI to both denials and patient payments, and is building a pipeline of regional/community providers who typically don’t have access to advanced AI and data science. Their innovative payment management tools have recently brought them accolades from within Wisconsin. Sift Health care was awarded in the Health IT category at the 2019 Wisconsin Innovation Awards.

Message Justin via email at siftmd@startuphealth.com.

Moira Schieke & Thomas Schieke

Co-founders, Cubismi | Wisconsin

Moira Schieke, MD and Thomas Schieke, MD, founders of Cubismi, are on a mission to put the power of health big data into the hands of patients and doctors. Cubismi is building a revolutionary health data exchange for delivery of 3D body precision clinical insights. The company’s 3D body-advanced, high dimension modeling deliver never-before-seen insights into tiny regions of human tissues to help doctors best care for patients. Precision “virtual biopsies” of the future are anticipated to answer questions such as: Is early cancer growing? What’s the genetic subtype of tumor? Is the tumor responding to treatment? Unlike other radiology systems, Cubismi’s “One File” hybrid cloud technology will allow low-cost, subscription-based access to state-of-the-art precision era technology. The company has initiated customer-focused product build and contracts with top academic medical centers, and has developed key partnerships.

Message Moira via email at cubisme@startuphealth.com.