A local Minnesota blogger and 22 year old college student, Geoff Dutton (blog; @geoffdunton), reached out to me about a healthcare startup called Koozala and his interest in writing for Minnov8 but I needed to do some investigation first before running the story.

Koozala has been put together by an entrepreneur, Ashish Gadnis, who is a guy I knew nothing about though he’s in tech in Minnesota. Ashish is the CEO and Founder of Forward Hindsight, Inc. as well as the founder of Koozala. He was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2009, plus he has even written a book, Sustainable Disruption.

Doing some fact-checking on both Geoff Dunton and Ashish Gadnis, I reached out and we went back-n-forth by email. The most important verification had to do with the number of registrants Koozala had garnered to date (to see if it was gaining any traction) and I was delighted to learn that the UofM student health services launched with Kazoola last October with a notification to about 4600 students and that Koozala processed / registered about 4300!

David Golden, Director, Public Health and Communications at the UofMN Boynton Health Service, had this to say when I reached out to him via email to tell me about Koozala and their experience with it:

“The Koozala site helped us reduce time correcting student immunization information. They submit their immunization dates online and we then get a report daily of the students who have successfully completed filling out the required information. It saves our staff (time) by insuring the self reported information provides us with the information needed to bring them into compliance with their immunization requirements.”

As a consequence of this and some other research, I decided to run Geoff’s article on Koozala — a very promising local Minnesota startup — and even invite Geoff to be a future contributor to Minnov8.

Now I Don’t Have To Ask Mom About My Medical History Anymore
by Geoff Dutton

You may have noticed just a few things in the news lately about health care reform. Don’t worry, this is not an opinion on it. I’m way too young to be worrying about health care. One thing I do like though is technology making my life easier, and that is exactly what Koozala will do.

Founded by Ashish Gadnis in 2009, Koozala is secure place to store your and your family’s medical history online. So far Koozala has nearly 6,000 registered members since going live with the University of Minnesota this past fall. Koozala will continue to roll out with Universities around the country to reduce errors in verifying student immunization records. And what’s a better state than Minnesota to start a company in the health care industry?

As a 22 year old college student, I basically know nothing about my medical history, much less my family’s. Obviously, this is bad. Koozala makes it easy to store all my information online and connect with my family member’s health records. So, this is clearly valuable to me.

What about the rest of the industry? According to Ashish, “Koozala is in line with the National Health Information Network requirements, thus making medical doctors’ lives a lot easier. Plus, the consumer gets to manage their health care, not the insurance companies!”

Koozala faces some pretty big competition, such as Google Health, but as much as I love Google, it has been known to have a few privacy issues, especially with its recently launched Buzz. Furthermore, Ashish describes Koozala as a consumer-focused site to store medical records. You are in complete control over who has access to your records and whom to share them with. When I logged into Google Health, I saw this which made me a bit uneasy:

"In the unlikely event we discover a security breach that allowed an unauthorized person to acquire information in your Google Health profile. Google will notify you at the email address you provided. You can also choose to receive such alerts by US mail."

Another huge plus is Koozala is already working on an Android app to access your records. Finally, you can even store your pet’s medical history, although I don’t have a pet, but maybe someone can chime in on the usefulness of this.