>newground
“What does the life sciences initiative really mean?” asked Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson at his 2003 State of the City Address. For one fascinating answer, Peterson looked no further than Julie Meek, who was seated in the audience.
Meek is the founder and CEO of a young life sciences company in Indianapolis, the Haelan Group, which helps businesses cut health care costs by using innovative techniques to analyze the health of their employees. The goal is twofold: to improve the health of a given population and to help companies avoid unnecessary expenditures on healthcare.
Haelan, with five employees, was the first tenant in the Indiana University Emerging Technology Center, a new building at IUPUI which serves as a business incubator to help new companies grow and to enable them to take new technology into the marketplace.
The story of this company begins long before its incubation period, however. It starts with Meek herself, a former emergency room nurse of 17 years at a busy hospital in Indianapolis. During her time there, she found that she treated a lot of people who didn't need to be there—and she noticed that many of them were repeat visitors.
This got her thinking. She went back to school and got her doctorate at IU, studying behavioral science. In 1995 she started the Haelan Group in her dining room as a health-care consulting company. She also began the research and development of one of their software products, One Care Street.
As Jim Kerr, Haelan’s vice president of business development puts it, “Eight to 12 percent of the adult population are getting ready to incur 40 to 70 percent of an organization's health-care costs in the next six to 12 months. The goal of our program is to find those people, bring them into proactive care management, and basically help them feel better. And if we can do that early and with enough people, organizations will realize stabilization or reductions in their health-care costs. They have employees or members who feel and function better, and that makes a tremendous impact in their organization and society.”
As one of the first test-cases for the new life sciences initiative, Meek is aware that more is at stake than her own and Haelan’s future success. “We need to be a great first example for this initiative to expand. And our success can in turn help to fuel the economic well-being of the city and state.”
Meeks goes on to list the numerous ways that IU has made this success more likely than not. As a result of IU’s role in the life sciences initiative, the Haelan Group has gained not only an excellent work environment, but a grant from IU for capital funding, technology assistance, and wonderful networking opportunities. The group has students from the Kelley School of Business exploring future prospects in other countries. And they have the Regenstrief Institute at the IU School of Medicine conducting an independent evaluation of their One Care Street program.
Some of the results are in already. As Kerr reports, “We have gone from covering 4,900 lives at the end of 2000 to covering 40,000 lives at the end of last year. This year we're up to just under 100,000 lives. We went from supporting four health advocates in 2000 to 56 health advocates today. And for a group in Cincinnati, we were able to reduce health-care costs by 38 percent in a year for Medicare-Medicaid members.”
Such numbers, it seems, foretell an auspicious future.
>Liz Rosdeitcher
Discover more about Haelan Group.