Steve Deal of IFG Health
Meet Steve Deal, founder of
IFG Health, an app that helps organize patient care.
How did you start your business?
I’d been working on a model for family medicine with Dr. A. Patrick Jonas in Beavercreek for a few years.
He brought to my attention an article about studies that show overuse of CT scans are causing tens of thousands of new cancers and killing about 15,000 people each year. Sunnie Southern made a guest appearance at The Circuit and talked about the
Innov8 for Health [start-up accelerator] program, and said Innov8 was looking for innovations that would improve safety and cut costs.
How did you come up the idea for your business?
I thought a radiation-tracking app would be easy to code, so I submitted the idea to the Innov8 Idea Expo and continued through the program to the accelerator. In preparing for phase II of the Innov8 for Health program, the
Business Concept Expo, we featured a prototype of a “Radiation Check-in” app, but the judges felt that was too narrow an application.
They suggested we emphasize tools for the patient-family-doctor encounter, so we developed the
IFG Provider Journal and the
IFG Care Plan Assistant. Both of these help patients to humanize and organize their clinical care.
What resources here did you take advantage of and how did they help?
The Innov8 for Health mentor team, Sunnie Southern, Dan Kincaid and Bob Petrik were great helps. Catalin and Valerie Macarie of
Cat Creatives played so many roles – helping to break the ice, providing supportive enthusiasm, creating a knockout logo for us and much more.
Queen City Angels and
Allos Ventures showed us the tough road we were going to have as a business-to-consumer company; their feedback helped us to define what we wanted to accomplish and how we’re going to bring value to our customers.
Also, the C-CAP/Queen City Angels’ Boot Camp presented through The Circuit was a great start. Particularly memorable was the talk on growth by Mark Faust, because it helped to set a vision of the future for our company that we could head toward.
What’s next for you and your company?
We’ve been working hard to get the IFG Provider Journal fielded so we can started letting users test and purchase it. The journal is an electronic version of the paper and pen health journals that I’m finding a lot of people keep for themselves and their families.
It’s the first of about 20 apps we have in mind and will be exciting to see it in use. We’ve also been preparing for crowd-sourcing campaigns through healthcare platforms like
Medstatr and
healthtechhatch.
Interview by Robin Donovan