Cincinnati : Innovation + Job News

Graduates of The Brandery, Over-the-Rhine’s popular startup accelerator, have access to a new pool of potential funding with the recent launch of Vine Street Ventures Fund LLC, a venture capital firm created by Brandery co-founders Robert McDonald, Brian Kropp and Dave Knox.
 
While Vine Street represents a for-profit reach by the nonprofit’s founders, some of The Brandery’s values have translated to the new firm. “The primary goal is making money for our investors," says McDonals. "That said, we expect that the fund will also help the Cincinnati ecosystem by drawing additional top-quality companies to Cincinnati and potentially encouraging them to stay."
 
The fund raised just under $1.4 million, according to an amended U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Dec. 10. Vine Street Ventures reported participation by 42 investors, each with a contribution of at least $15,000. The fund’s initial offering was $2 million.
 
Asked whether the recent addition of new venture capital agencies in Cincinnati made for a competitive atmosphere, McDonald expresses hope that investors would bolster startups at various stages of development.

“To effectively fund a venture track business, we need to have a horizontal offering of funding sources. Vine Street Ventures focuses on the early growth companies coming out of The Brandery, but our portfolio companies will likely need funding all the way from Series A [the initial round of venture funding] through Series ZZ, as the case may be. We are thrilled with the current activity in Cincinnati and welcome any other funds that visit the region," he says.

By Robin Donovan

A virtual trade mission taken by University of Cincinnati MBA students and local industries has turned into a very real product that could put a dent in food shortages across India.

Next year, new solar-powered refrigerator products will be tested on an aloe farm in the developing country early next year. If successful, the SolerCool could be a reality for Indian farmers, just in time for summer.

The product is a self-contained cooling unit that relies on the sun for power. It's a box that measures 10' x 7' x 11', and is topped by solar panels. SolerCool was developed through a collaboration between former and current UC students and local industries, including SimpliCool Technologies International LLC in Waynesville.

The idea for the technology came after the MBA students and SimpliCool attended a "virtual trade mission" to India in July 2011. The mission was part of a Business Law for Managers class taught by Ilse Hawkins, an attorney and adjunct professor of accounting at UC. The mission virtually brought Cincinnati and Indian businesses together to find ways of partnering to better preserve Indian produce.

Today, 30 to 40 percent of produce in India is lost to spoilage because of lack of refrigeration options, Hawkins says. India, with 1.2 million people, faces chronic food shortages.

"While we were doing the mission, we had this tiny, insulated structure that kept audio visual materials at proper temperature," Hawkins says. "We thought, 'Why couldn't we create a structure powered with solar panels like that that could be put anywhere on a farm?'"

Shortly after that meeting, Hawkins took a group to India where the idea was further flushed out. Eventually, a collaborative effort led to the creation of the SolerCool unit.

MBA students worked on a business plan, helped with the initial feasibility calculations and networked with Indian businesses who might contribute to the product.

Mohsen Rezayat, chief solutions architect at Siemens UGS PLM Software and adjunct professor in UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, primarily worked on the engineering of the solar panels in the SimpliCool-manufactured cooling cube.

UC does not own the product, and therefore won't be profiting from its sales, Hawkins says. However, SimpliCool has vowed to contribute to UC's College of Business to fund further travel to India if the idea is successful, she says.

By Feoshia H. Davis
Follow Feoshia on Twitter

“Do you know WHY you do what you do?” Ephipheo founder Ben Crawford’s PowerPoint slide asked the key question of the day at Bold Fusion, the region’s largest convergence of young talent, which took place at Music Hall last week.

This year’s theme—“The Power of Enchantment”—fit speakers Crawford and Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple.

Crawford discussed how “Truth. Story. Love.” motivates everything that Epipheo creates, from promotional videos to marketing. The young founder believes in only employing those who share his vision, and he thinks that human resource departments are absurd.

“How much of a tragedy is it that HR…well, that HR even exists,” Crawford says.

Young professionals in the audience gathered tips like how to smile sincerely and how to create the perfect PowerPoint presentation. The atmosphere was friendly—attendees were comfortable, excited and actively mingled.

“Young professionals have realized their voice in our region,” says Chris Kemper, PR director at the Chamber. “Bold Fusion encourages young professional energy.”

Citing three young professional city council members and causes backed by the YPs, like the Cincinnati streetcar, Kemper believes young professionals are the key to building a more successful city.

“YPs drive vibrant regions, and to have a vibrant region, you have to have a strong heart,” says Kemper.

For young professionals in Cincinnatia, the heart is already here; they’re just feeding off of it.

Bryant Goulding, of RhineGeist and Tazza Mia, moved from San Francisco, where his consulting job left him “starving for creativity and feeling like just a number.” Goulding finds the YP scene here exciting and compelling. “It does parallel the San Francisco startup scene, but it’s more focused,” he says.

Amy Taylor, another Bold Fusion attendee, agrees. “I hope big business is noticing; Cincinnati is a really good place for young energy."

For Carey Rennekamp of Vehr Communications, being a young professional is a huge point of pride. “Yes, I am a YP, and I think it means being bold, being fearless and finding the voice to make a difference."

By Gina Gaetano

Following the Brandery’s Demo Day, the rising social network CrowdHall has been developing new products and securing new investors.

While CrowdHall developer and CTO Nick Wientge is currently working at the Brandery with marketing and design staff, Jordan Menzel and CEO Austin Hackett have been traveling for business development and fundraising.

“We’re currently in due diligence process with a number of angel investment communities and institutional investment communities that span the Cincinnati area, Chicago, Utah and New York,” Menzel says.

The company is also looking to move forward with Vine Street Ventures.

“We’re also in the process of turning around a new product iteration, some of which has been added onto the site already,” Menzel says. “Another trunk will be coming out in January.”

One of its newest developments, “CrowdHall for Politics,” is an initiative based on a set of principles that CrowdHall created for elected officials: accessibility, responsiveness and innovation.

“We’re going to begin to highlight the elected officials that have committed to demonstrate those principles,” Menzel says. “We’ll be featuring a number of politicians from the federal, state and local level that are using CrowdHall to better keep an open door for decisions, now that the election is over.”

The initiative will be under development through the new year.

“If you’ve been looking for a place that provides you with the tools to be able to ask your questions, share ideas and your statement, and peer vote on the ones you would like to see rise to the top, CrowdHall is where you’re going to go to do that,” Menzel says.

By Kyle Stone

With big names in branding hovering in and around Cincinnati, it can start to seem like the brand is everything, and intangible products are the only thing that can really sell – and scale.

However, two industrial designers pairing up in Over-the-Rhine are challenging that assumption, combining their skills in design, engineering, and budding knowledge of manufacturing and sourcing materials at a start-up they call “The Launch Werks.”

As the name implies, The Launch Werks not only offers its own, tangible products, but helps small businesses and innovators create prototypes from their ideas. That means doing everything from helping to design prototypes that consumers will rush to engage with to planning the look of the final object, imagining how people might interact with it, and even specifying the materials it should be manufactured from and where to purchase them.

Co-founders Noel Gauthier and Matt Anthony met as industrial design students at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP) and quickly realized a shared interested in what happens after the design phase of a new product.

“The leap it takes to to go from an idea to a real product fascinates us," Gauthier explains. "So much happens when an idea is translated into a made thing … Having worked in various product design firms around the country, we never had a close connection with where and how the products we designed were being made.”

So he and Anthony began to connect Cincinnati-area product development with high-quality manufacturing, filling a niche for companies that weren’t ready for large-scale production, but needed something to show potential investors.

Anthony says he sees an opening right now for foodie-friendly items. “I think we’re going to see more local stores and products follow developments in the food movement: making unique products and doing it well. But we want to see some of them scale the way that Jeni’s Ice Cream or Taste of Belgium has.”

For a city already big on branding, it might just be a tasty step in the right direction.

By Robin Donovan

Tim Schigel is the chairman and founder of ShareThis, a sharing and engagement platform. He served as the director of Blue Chip Venture Company and was involved with the growth of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, a leading platform for measuring blog sentiment and forums, and Third Screen Media, the first mobile advertising platform.
 
Schigel will be sharing his experience and tips with other entrepreneurs at the first Startup Grind event in Cincinnati, Dec. 6 at The Brandery.
 
What was your first startup in Cincinnati?

My first job out of college (CWRU BSEE) was with Pharos Technologies. I was employee number 11. The company grew and became Digineer. I created a pioneering product for remote computer management for the Mac at the time. I also built P&G’s world-wide network. This was all in the early 90s.
 
Where did you get your idea for that first startup?

I’ve always enjoyed pursuing new ideas. At Pharos, I grew and transitioned from a technical role into the VP of Sales and Marketing, and eventually left to do my own thing. I was also fascinated with venture capital and the fast-paced tech lifestyle of Silicon Valley. I come from a family of entrepreneurs, albeit mostly small business.
 
Why do you think startups are important to the community?

Startups are the engine of innovation. There is so much freedom to explore technology, business management and business models. This creates a great environment for unanticipated results.

Often great innovations are accidental. It takes the right environment, however, to let those accidents happen. The other factor that is a driving force for startups is time—they don’t have any. It forces the entrepreneur to adapt quickly in all respects.
 
Do you regularly attend Startup Grind meetings?

No, this is the first one. I’m excited, and anyone who knows me knows that I love to help startups and explore new ideas.
 
Where do you draw your inspiration from when coming up with new ideas?

Everywhere. I’m a big believer in the cross-pollination of ideas. The next answer to a software problem might come from biology or some other completely different domain.

We should put everything on the table and encourage people to develop a natural curiosity and well-rounded perspective. I also think innovation comes from constraints. Some of the most interesting products have emerged from very constrained environments that act as a forcing function for creativity. Open-ended creativity is actually hard and doesn’t always lead to the most interesting solution.

Finally, I like taking a contrarian point of view. If everyone thought about a problem the same way, you would lack new ideas. Sometimes the biggest disruptive ideas are viewed as out of touch, misunderstood or not even recognized until after they’ve become disruptive.

This is an interesting balancing act for an entrepreneur because you need to be a good listener and respond to feedback, but also stay true to your convictions. The more informed those convictions are, the better. Some people stick to convictions regardless of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Ultimately, the evidence should hopefully support your thesis and when that happens, you know you’ve done something new and special.
 

By Caitlin Koenig
Follow Caitlin on Twitter

Entrepreneurship isn't just for startups.

That's the tagline and philosophy behind The Garage Group, a Cincinnati-based consultancy that helps large, established companies tap into their entrepreneurial spirit.

The Hyde Park-based company was co-founded by Jason Hauer and Ann Lauer, two business colleagues who left their jobs at a small innovation firm to start their own businesses.

"The concept for The Garage Group reflects what we've liked to do across the lifetime of our careers, unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit of a startup, along with the discipline and focus of a larger, established organization," Lauer says. "Our skill sets complemented one another."

Lauer spent 17 years working in the corporate and nonprofit worlds. She's experienced in strategic planning, leadership and business development in addition to marketing and research. Hauer's experience lies in business model creation and scale up, entrepreneurial and growth strategy, idea creation and project movement.

More companies are turning to this type of internal entrepreneurship to create new products and services, as economic pressures force them to do more with less, Lauer says.

The Garage Group offers one-on-one business consulting as well as workshops that help companies address specific innovation challenges.

"We work in three main areas: strategy, ideas and organizational development," Lauer says. "We help organizations develop a platform to support innovation. We look at how the organization assigns roles, how people interact with each other and company culture. There are seven different elements we look at in developing an entrepreneurship structure within a company."

The company's clients have included Cincinnati Children's Hospital, Greater Cincinnati Health Council, Nationwide Insurance, Kantar, a consumer insight company and LPK.

"Most companies don't have an entrepreneurial strategy, or if they do, it's too short-term or too experimental," Hauer says. "We can help them come up with a pipeline of ideas, drive focus and create a process for testing those ideas."

The Garage Group's ultimate goal is to help its clients create a process that allows a constant stream of innovation, tapping internal talent to grow.

By Feoshia H. Davis
Follow Feoshia on Twitter

“A digital spin on the traditional photo booth” is Kelley Andersen’s super-short explanation of Booth FX Photo Booth Company, which she launched with her partner, Allison Gates, last month. The pair built the idea for their company on a love of photo booths, two creative personalities and their vision for a photo booth that was more than a traditional, space-limited box.

“We first looked at the booths you can buy, and they were nice, but not what we were looking for," Andersen says. "We wanted something that was more digital. I love Instagram, and was trying to figure out how we could do that as a photo booth."

The booth they custom-built  – “with a lot of time and a lot of mistakes,” Andersen adds – measures 1.5 ft. by 1.5 ft., is 5.5 feet tall and incorporates software that allows photos to be viewed, edited and shared.

Rather than expecting participants to hop inside, the booth houses the photography equipment. Participants gather in the space around the booth to snap a photo in front of customized backdrops the women create for each event with input from hosts.

Features of the booth include a wireless remote and a touchscreen for viewing images on the back of the booth. That allows attendees to view photos, use filter effects (much in the same way as one would with Instagram) and upload images to social media immediately. The co-founders provide wireless internet with a mobile hotspot.

Booth FX launched last month, and both founders still have full-time day jobs, Gates as a designer and Andersen as an insurance analyst. So far, they’ve been commissioned for fundraising events and they plan to reach out to local brides- and grooms-to-be to expand their business into weddings.

By Robin Donovan
 

Two recent graduates of The Brandery shared how to pitch a startup idea to investors and potential employees at on of the Digital Non Conference’s breakout sessions last week. Hunter Hammonds and Freddie Pikovsky recently pitched their startup ideas at The Brandery’s Demo Day and are now in the process of procuring funds and building teams.

Hammonds is the CEO and co-founder of Impulcity, a city app that makes a night on the town a breeze. Users can buy tickets to shows and view the specials at bars all in one place. Originally from Louisville, Hammonds came to Cincinnati because of The Brandery.

While searching for employees, he realized Cincinnati has a lot of local talent—he hasn’t needed to hire anyone from outside Ohio yet because of the wealth of designers here.

Pikovsky, originally from Brooklyn, is the CEO and founder of Off Track Planet. His startup began as a travel blog three years ago and is now a travel site and mobile app geared toward people in their mid-20s and early 30s. Pikovsky was drawn to The Brandery like Hammonds was, and wanted to be part of the startup ecosystem.

“Right now is an amazing time to be part of The Brandery,” Pikovsky says.

Hammonds and Pikovsky know it’s important to sell their ideas, whether it’s to a potential investor or new hires. In both cases, they have to make sure the startup’s roadmap is clear and focused; otherwise, investors might not be interested and employees won’t know which way is up.

Off Track Planet recently launched its beta version, and in three months, Pikovsky and his team hope to have the full release out. Impulcity will be launching soon and focusing solely on Cincinnati to start with, but Hammonds’ goal is to have it be an app for those living outside of the Tri-State area too.

By Caitlin Koenig
Follow Caitlin on Twitter
Caitlin is an Associate Editor for Barefoot Proximity

As many areas of Cincinnati are being rejuvenated, including OTR and Washington Park, the City of Cincinnati approved a comprehensive approach to focus on development in the city as a whole, not just targeted neighborhoods. 

Last Friday, the City Planning Commission approved and adopted Plan Cincinnati, which was designed with input from residents. The Plan is an opportunity to strengthen what people love about the city, what works and what needs more attention, says Katherine Keough-Jurs, senior city planner and project manager.
 
The idea is to re-urbanize suburbanized Cincinnati; in a sense, to return to the strengths of the city's beginnings. Cincinnati was established just after the American Revolution in 1788 and grew into an industrial center in the 19^th century. Many of those industries no longer exist in the city, which is part of why Cincinnati has become more suburbanized in the past 50 years. One of the long-term goals of the Plan is to bring new industries to Cincinnati.
 
With a new approach to revitalization, Cincinnati is blazing the trail for other cities. With a focus on building on existing strengths rather than tearing down structures and creating new ones, the Plan aims to capitalize on the city's “good bones” and good infrastructure.
 
Cinicinnatians had a huge role in developing the Plan. The first public meeting for the Plan was held in September 2009, when residents offered their insights into “what makes a great city?" and "what would make Cincinnati a great city?” A steering committee of 40 people representing businesses, nonprofits, community groups, local institutions, residents and City Council helped develop the Plan.

The Plan also got support from a grant from the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, which the City received in 2010. The grant allotted $2.4 million over three years to support the Land Development Code, which combines and simplifies Cincinnati's codes, reviews the development process, implements Form-based Codes and considers more creative uses for land. The grant allowed the city to start implementing some of the ideas voiced in public meetings.
 
Visionaries included youth, too. City staff worked with community centers and Cincinnati Public Schools to develop an art project for children. They were given clay pots and asked to paint their fears for the city on the inside and their dreams for the city on the outside. The children saw the big issue was quality of life, just like the adults did.
 
“It was an interesting way to get the kids involved and thinking about the future,” Keough-Jurs says.
 
The Plan aims to strengthen neighborhood centers—the neighborhoods’ business districts. It maps out areas that people need to get to on a daily basis and found that most are within about a half-mile of the business districts. But in some neighborhoods, residents can’t access their neighborhood centers. 

The accessibility of a neighborhood center is based on walkability—not just for pedestrians, but also about how structures address walking. For exampke, if a pedestrian can walk from one end of the neighborhood center to the other without breaking his or her pattern (the window shopping effect), the area is walkable; if he or she has been stopped by a parking lot or vacancies, it’s not walkable, Keough-Jurs says.
 
The neighborhood centers are classified in one of three ways in the Plan: maintain, evolve or transform. Some neighborhoods have goals to maintain levels of walkability, whereas others need to gradually change or evolve. Still others need to completely transform in order to strengthen their business districts.
 
“Cincinnati is at the heart of the region,” Keough-Jurs says. “If we strengthen Cincinnati, we strengthen a region.”

The next step for the Plan is to go before the Cincinnati City Council, specifically the Livable Communities Committee, which is chaired by Vice Mayor Roxanne Qualls.
 
By Caitlin Koenig
Follow Caitlin on Twitter

When Josh Fendley and four tech-savvy friends left their digital agency to launch a smaller venture, they were looking for a business name that would convey their small staff’s concentrated experience. Ample fit the bill, and is still a point of pride because one of the firm’s selling points is its size.

"Clients realize that if I’m the one selling them on doing the work, they’re going to be working with me the entire time if they choose to engage us," Fendley says. "When we left our last agency, we were all directors of this and that, but decided we wanted to get back to doing work instead of just managing it."

Fendley says the trick of being small is to carefully select experienced employees, with an eye to maintaining company culture. “We have only one relatively young employee, and we belabored on whether or not we should do that,” he says.

Recently, Ample has been pivoting away from marketing to focus on building websites and developing strategic, creative digital projects, including video and websites that easily scale down desktop applications for mobile interfaces and apps. 

"All the sites we create automatically scale and reformat," Fendley says. "Not a lot of people are actually doing that." 

Ample also developed its own content management system.

Along with size and experience, Ample’s culture is shaped by its brainy core. "We love being presented with something we don’t know how to get through. We love to figure out how to do it," Fendley says. 

Ample is primarily a Ruby on Rails shop, but also offers help with strategic planning.

So, when Ample got a call from a New Jersey nonprofit seeking to outfit students with disabilities with human-read audio books, its developers created an iTunes-like app compatible with a variety of devices.

"A lot of our long-time clients pay us to think for them, and I think that’s where we’re most successful,” Fendley says, noting that new business largely comes from referrals, and the team is turning away prospective clients.“Clients are your best salespeople. If you do well by them, them will typically give you some good karma back."

By Robin Donovan

At the Brandery's third Demo Day Oct. 3, a packed house at Great American Ball Park looked forward to a home run, but not from the field below. 

The stadium's Champions Club had been transformed into a space where founders of 11 startups paced, shook hands and smiled as they prepared to offer their practiced pitches that they knew could net them millions in investment dollars.

This year, there were more than twice as many applicants for the seed-stage startup accelerator in Over-the-Rhine as both of its earlier years, combined, according to Brandery General Manager Mike Bott. 

Only 10 percent of those applicants were local, Bott says. The companies selected for the intensive four-month session in Cincinnati hailed from Seattle and Brooklyn, from Cleveland and San Francisco. One local business, REPP, made the final cut.

As its name implies, The Brandery focuses mostly on consumer products and services. Its strength is in its location and its expertise: the branding giants of Cincinnati help make The Brandery attractive to entrepreneurs from around the world. The latest startup session included plenty of mobile and social applications. 

An example? The first startup to present on Demo Day: CrowdHall.

Crowdhall, a free social platform, collects questions and ideas from a single crowd and helps the members of an audience organize and prioritize them democratically. Matthew Dooley, founder and CEO of Cincinnati's dooley media, made a bold prediction about this startup, which has already created "crowd halls" with NYU prof and Earth Institute leader Jeffrey Sachs, Dhani Jones and PG Sittenfeld. 

Dooley's tweet: "Impressed with @crowdhall pitch at #brandery2012 #demoday. Will be bought out by Twitter within a year. #boldprediction @brandery @jbkropp."

You've read about this Brandery class in Soapbox for months now, from Sostock, which planted roots and intends to remain in Cincinnati, to REPP, the latest big idea from Cincinnatians Michael Bergman, his wife BreeAnna and David Volker, formerly of LPK (where Bergman also formerly worked).

Find a full list of startups here. And more coverage of The Brandery on Nibletz, "the voice of startups everywhere else."

By Elissa Yancey
Follow Elissa on Twitter.

Dawn Sheanshang, a pharmaceutical sales rep, became sick of medications one day. Despite her insider knowledge, she couldn’t handle the medication regimen of a loved one who’d recently been discharged from the hospital.

Determined to help, Sheanshang searched online for solutions but found no easy answers. Out of her frustration, MedaCheck was born. With the help of startup acceleration Innov8 for Health, and a partnership with Jeffrey Shepard, a self-described “serial entrepreneur with a Ph.D.,” this high-tech health startup – and its eponymous app – were born.

“More and more today, medication regimens are extremely complicated, with many different drugs and people’s changing presciriptions," Shepard says. “People are using mobile devices for a slew of different things. We wanted to target our product around medication adherence – ensuring they’re taking the right pill at the right time, in the right amount and having it set up with a system to ensure they’re actually doing it.” 

Instead of simply placing a reminder on your phone, this app works with the pharmacies, utilizing frequently updated, high-resolution images of the approximately 16,000 medications catalogued by the National Library of Medicine. 

When it’s time to take a medication, a user can click on the pill box to open it, then view their medications using photos and bulleted lists of pertinent details: medication name, dosage, etc. Reminders, including a phone-call reminder if a dose is missed, are also built in.

The challenges of developing such an app include the necessity of HIPAA compliance and generics that constantly change. 

“The challenge is making sure that you’re not making specific claims around medication consumption,” says Shepard. “We don’t give anybody advice or share any information about any specific individual.”

The company is running a pilot of the app in November in collaboration with Cincinnati-based Kroger, with the hopes of making the app public in mid-November. Users will pay a small fee to download the app, which will be available through their pharmacy.

A web-based app as well as native apps for mobile devices is available.
 
By Robin Donovan

Like all with an entrepreneurial spirit, Xavier University junior Anthony Breen is a problem solver.

While he was spending a few days at a local hospital visiting a friend, he met some young children who'd been diagnosed with illnesses. He immediately saw a challenge that he could meet.

"When kids are diagnosed, they are given pamphlets written for adults and by adults. It's not in any way engaging. It's scary," says Breen, a finance and entrepreneurship major, with a minor in accounting.

It was from that experience that Breen developed a web-based app that uses storytelling to teach diabetic children about their disease in an understandable way. It's aimed at ages 2 to 12.

The app, MyHealthyTale, follows a diabetic character through a 15-minute story where the child can answer questions about their chronic disease by following the character through the story. The story pulls from a database of questions, mixing them up. So each time children read the story, they get different questions.

"The can name a bear that goes through the story and customize it," Breen says. "It's a fun way to learn that's not scary."

MyHealthyTale is the inaugural offering of Breen's Minerva Health Learning Systems, one of the winning companies for the new Innov8 for health Startup Accelerator.

MyHealthyTale will soon be available at the iPhone App store, and available on Android in the next three months. In addition to the story book, there's also information and support resources for parents, including the ability to direct email caregivers and other parents with diabetic children.

Breen is working with Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and diabetic educators at Cincinnati Children's and The Christ hospitals. Eventually, he wants to expand the app, with stories that cover a range of illnesses.

"Really, this can be used for any medical condition," he says."Right now we're just entering the market, and we want to move this into asthma and obesity."

By Feoshia H. Davis
Follow Feoshia on Twitter.

Steve Deal has one problem with the infusion of technology into today’s healthcare model: it leaves out the patient. “We have the government pouring money into health IT on the providers’ side, but patients don’t have anything,” he says.

Along with co-founders Rene Raphael Vogt-Lowell and David Pingleton, Deal launched IFG Health, which is now in the beginning stages of launching a host of apps aimed at helping patients and families work more efficiently with their physicians and other healthcare providers.

Their first app, the IFG Provider Journal is available in web and mobile versions, and has a Facebook-like interface that allows users to track vital statistics, such as height, weight or blood pressure, record details of care plans during appointments and note progress via text and photos.

In many ways, the app is an electronic version of the notebook many people take to their physician’s office, and may be especially useful for caregivers who help a loved one manage complex conditions. 

Unlike a physical notebook, the app has search and sort functions for ease. Deal says that having information available – even basics that should be in a provider’s electronic medical record – helps appointments flow smoothly when time is limited. Also, not every physician or nurse is comfortable with EMRs, Deal points out.

A video on the company’s website says physicians wait an average of 10 to 15 seconds for the answer to a question before they move on, with or without the necessary information. 

Deal has experienced this firsthand as a caregiver for his father and mother-in-law, but doesn’t fault physicians. Today’s primary care providers, he points out, “go from one life crisis to another every 15 minutes,” facing burnout along the way. 

He hopes that organized patients will be able to partner better with their doctors, and plans to unveil a host of new web and mobile apps to help.

By Robin Donovan