Business Profile: Company’s team approach encourages healthy living
Dr. Jan Swaney has been a practicing physician, medical school professor and managed care executive for more than 20 years and offers guidance, prescriptions and encouragement to individuals who need to reverse unhealthy lifestyles.
Although the chance to help patients through her practice in Columbia offered certain rewards, it also presented frustrations. The one-to-one doctor-patient model had its limitations.
Swaney could only visit with each patient an average of 15 minutes during an appointment. And in many cases, she was seeing patients at later stages in their lives, long after unhealthy habits such as smoking and poor nutrition had taken a toll on her patients’ bodies and life-expectancy prospects.
She wanted to serve more people. She wanted to reach them earlier in their lives. And she also wanted to help her fellow physicians improve their patient care.
Three years ago, Swaney and Tracy Korman met at the opening session of the annual conference of the Disease Management Association of America and discovered they both had more than a passing interest in methods of promoting individual wellness.
“We learned our attitudes and goals about promoting patient wellness and our professional talents and experiences were compatible and complementary,” Swaney said.
Following considerable discussion and planning, Swaney and Korman established a health-promotion venture, Longitude Health Inc.
Longitude Health is intended to achieve its goals through an Internet-based connection called MyHealthVillage.com. The service — along with a personal HealthGuide — is designed to educate, motivate and reward employees, consumers and patients to exercise, eat right and practice healthy lifestyles.
“The resources at MyHealthVillage.com, linked to the personal HealthGuide and the primary care physician, can help lead to real health improvement for many individuals,” Swaney said.
Swaney directs the “Health Team” at MyHealthVillage.com, which includes another MU-affiliated physician, Dr. Julie Stansfield, three registered nurses trained at MU and a registered dietician.
Of course, to improve patient health, Swaney and Korman also realized they needed to devote attention to the health of their newly founded company. To promote its chances of survival, the enterprising entrepreneurs have explored several avenues to encourage their firm’s commercial viability.
One road has led to the state of Georgia. There, Longitude Health is working with the state’s Division of Public Health to give private employers access to wellness benefits, information and advice for their employees. Currently three companies, each with 100 to 300 employees, are enrolled in the program.
“As the economy improves, we anticipate that additional companies in Georgia will enroll in the program,” Swaney said.
The approach to wellness at Longitude Health is educate, motivate and reward employees, consumers and patients to consistently exercise, eat right and practice healthy lifestyles.
“Employers — especially employers who have bases of loyal, long-term, talented employees — find the benefits of encouraging employee wellness far outweigh the expense of the program,” Swaney said. “They’ll reap rewards in a healthier employee population that takes fewer sick days and ultimately extends productive careers as a result of practicing healthy lifestyles.”
Another avenue of revenue generation for Longitude Health leads to research Swaney hopes to pursue. With the help of the staff at the Missouri Small Business and Technology Development Center at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Swaney has applied for a $210,000 research grant from the National Institutes of Health. The road to that application was a long and winding one.
Following a workshop in Columbia two years ago conducted by Paul Rehrig, a commercialization specialist with SBTDC, Swaney applied for a $5,000 Missouri Technology Incentive Program grant. She received approval, and that money enabled her to hire the help she needed to write the Small Business Innovative Research grant funded through the NIH. Her proposal is aimed at improving the lifestyles of diabetes patients.
“The resulting research could lead to improvements in self-motivation for a population of patients whose diabetes diagnosis requires more vigilant attention and devotion to healthy lifestyle practices,” she said.
Swaney said the sessions she had with staff members of the MU SBTDC “opened opportunities that can lead Longitude Health down the path to helping more people improve their long-term health. Without the help and valuable advice from these SBTDC professionals, I might never have arrived at this point in my quest for research funding.”
This story was featured in the November MissouriBusiness.net newsletter.
Longitude Health Inc.
3610 Buttonwood Drive, Suite 200
234-6500
www.longitudehealth.com
[email protected]