AgilityIP: Relentlessly Accelerating Healthcare Innovation
DENVER, COLORADO: After months of planning, relationship-building, and groundwork, Denver-based health tech executives Drew Kallestad and Ken Sloan launched Agility Innovation Partners this week. Agility Innovation Partners (AgilityIP) is a healthcare innovation accelerator, here to connect the most promising healthcare innovators to AgilityIP’s powerful national distribution network of brokers and consultants in the health benefits, health tech, insurance, and healthcare sectors.
Ken Sloan and Drew Kallestad, Cofounders of Denver, Colorado-based Agility Innovation Partners.
“Truly solving problems in healthcare for employees and their families requires agility on the part of all members of the supply chain,” says Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Drew Kallestad. “Status quo is on the way out. Nimble, fast-to-market, agile solutions are the future. We connect the most promising new innovations to trusted advisors and distribution partners, seeking solutions in healthcare that remove costs and improve health for Americans nationwide.”
AgilityIP Announces Newest Innovation Partners
Adding credence to their launch announcement, AgilityIP announced the addition of three new innovation partners to their expanding portfolio of healthcare innovations. Those new healthcare innovations are: Minneapolis-based Nice Healthcare, San Francisco-based FITT Finder, and Scottsdale-based Clever RX. See a summary below:
Nice Healthcare: House calls makes a comeback! Just 50 years ago, house calls were common for primary care providers – back when healthcare was nice. Nice Healthcare is bringing nice back, and AgilityIP is leading Minnesota-based Nice Healthcare’s national expansion into western states, including Colorado, Arizona, Washington, Nebraska, Oregon, and beyond. Launching in January, 2021, employers and their people will love this high-value, low-cost health benefit. For just $36 per month, Nice not only cares for the employee, but their whole family. Nice was built for times like these – perfect for work-from-home employees and their families to stay healthy, with or without health insurance. Employers are bound to fall in love with Nice, to attract and retain the best employees.
FITT Finder: Find fitness classes and activities you love with this realtime fitness discovery engine. Find online fitness classes, in-person fitness classes; individual and group fitness classes; private and park district classes, and more. Ideal for forward-thinking employers to embed into their own benefits package, to help keep their people active and healthy, no matter whether they’re at home, office, or traveling anywhere in the country. FITT Finder’s frictionless API, geo-location technology, deep personalization attributes, and low cost of (just a penny per employee per month) make it a perfect fit for employers seeking to keep their workplace fit and happy.
Clever RX: Think “Good RX” for business, and that begins to describe Clever RX. Clever RX is a prescription price transparency card & mobile app that’s built to save people up to 80% on prescriptions at major pharmacies, including CVS, Walgreen’s, Walmart, Rite Aid, Kroger, Costco, and more. Not only does Clever RX beat Good RX 60% of the time, Clever RX is the prescription card that pays our Agility Partners back. Why let Big Pharma or Apple (they’re the brand behind the Good RX brand) pay you nothing to promote so-called “Good RX,” when Clever RX not only saves more, but pays you back? Now that’s clever!
“Our Distribution Partners are lighting up their respective markets,” said Ken Sloan, cofounder and Chief Growth Officer at AgilityIP. “We’ve already signed deals to bring these innovations to over 250,000 people nationwide, and we’ve only just begun. There’s a new, transparent and honest way to truly provide functional health care to Americans, and AgilityIP is bringing the front-runners to market right now. Despite all the negativity we see in politics and culture right now, I’m bullish about the future of healthcare.”
Keeping It Simple: Improve Health. Remove Cost.
There’s massive transformation currently underway in the healthcare sector, and Agility Innovation Partners has positioned itself to help facilitate that change. Cofounder Drew Kallestad shared, “We felt a moral imperative to use our decades of experience and high-value connections to accelerate the most promising innovations, bringing them to the attention of many of the most influential people in their respective business sectors – people we know on a first-name basis.”
Cofounder Ken Sloan added, “The Lord presented us with an opportunity to use our gifts to mentor and guide innovations into a market that’s hungry to replace contentious and complex challenges with real solutions that truly improve health and remove cost. We’re here to accelerate these mission-driven innovations through ‘Value-Based Innovation,’ and so far, the market loves it!”
Agility’s Three-Year “Overnight Success”
AgilityIP’s launch is a capstone for young company, founded by Kallestad in 2017. The original business model offered consulting to Colorado Front Range businesses seeking guidance in implementing innovative Direct Primary Care solutions for corporations, non-profits, and government agencies.
Drew’s 25-plus years as an executive in the health benefits sector equipped him with the insights and connections to strike out on his own, to solve some of the problems he witnessed plaguing the healthcare and health benefits sectors. Witnessing a broken healthcare system from “the other side of the curtain” provided him with plenty of motivation to make the leap into the fast-growing Direct Primary Care model, providing a sales channel to provide high-quality primary care, direct to employees and their families on a subscription basis.
He found success introducing DPC to employers and health benefits brokers, helping to connect a much-needed sales pipeline to the fiercely independent network of Direct Primary Care providers throughout the front range. Surprisingly to some (but not to Drew), he also found success bringing the DPC model to insurance carriers, successfully acquiring carrier subsidies to cover all or part of the monthly DPC fees.
This trend of re-orienting and repurposing a shifting healthcare landscape, rather than pitting them as enemies, continues today at AgilityIP. Says Kallestad, “Agility Innovation Partners is dedicated to accelerating the shift from sacred healthcare structures with ‘winners & losers’ to a new, data-driven architecture where everybody wins.”
In 2018, Kallestad expanded the consultancy, offering a Health Data Analytics practice, focused on payment integrity and data transparency for employers, brokers, Third Party Administrators (TPAs), and their clients. The addition of payment integrity offerings to the line-up also served up a win-win for employers, employees, brokers, TPAs, and insurance carriers alike, as they found new technology and processes to identify and remove costs for all parties, without sacrificing quality of care.
Enter: Ken Sloan
Success in fostering healthcare innovation is what attracted Ken Sloan to leave his highly successful position with a global wellness organization to join AgilityIP as a cofounder and equity partner in 2019. Ken’s deep knowledge of health technology, wellness, and insurance sectors, combined with his proven success establishing national distribution networks was key factor the two needed to succeed at their real passion: bringing upstart healthcare innovations to a national marketplace.
Both Ken and Drew are now all-in, delivering innovations to a market that thirsting for next generation solutions in healthcare. The partners added a third initiative to round out AgilityIP’s lineup of Direct Primary Care and Health Data Transparency initiatives. That third initiative: Health Technology.
AgilityIP Hits The Accelerator
With “Relentlessly accelerating healthcare innovation” as their mantra, Agility Innovation Partners debuted its new brand on July 4, 2020 to help the most promising new innovations in healthcare connect to the most prestigious brokers on the planet.
In early 2020, sensing a shift in the ecosystem, and a pressing need to accelerate the process of empowering innovators in the fast-changing market, partners Kallestad and Sloan re-imagined and re-engineered the organization, synthesizing their combined strengths to scale from a regional consultancy to that of a national accelerator for start-up innovations in healthcare.
That in turn resulted in a re-branding from Agility Direct Care Solutions, to Agility Innovation Partners in May, 2020, with its official announcement coming on Independence Day. The market is responding quickly, with major national partnership and distribution deals soon to be announced for each of their Innovation Partners – FITT Finder, Nice Healthcare, and Clever RX. AgilityIP has also signed on several new highly desirable Distribution Partners nationwide.
To support their marketing and technology efforts, AgilityIP added digital agency veteran and technology event producer John Coonen as their Chief Marketing Officer. Said Coonen, “I feel blessed to use my talents to help health care innovations succeed. With Drew and Ken’s savvy, AgilityIP is the perfect guide to help innovators navigate a complex and treacherous path forward.” He added, “The way to truly transform healthcare isn’t to attack it head-on, but to focus on removing cost and improving health. Our strategy is sneaky: we aim to make healthcare transformation a byproduct. By using Value-based Innovations from AgilityIP rather than overpriced and underperforming status quo solutions, employers remove costs, while they improve the health of their workforce, not even realizing they are the catalyst and keystone for long-overdue changes in healthcare.”