About the HealthTree Foundation

Our Story

Jenny Ahlstrom was diagnosed in 2010 with the rare blood cancer multiple myeloma at the young age of 43. With technology expertise, she and her husband Paul believed that patients could accelerate a cure by sharing their cancer stories and data with their peers and with the research community and launched the HealthTree Foundation in 2012.

Over the course of the last decade, the HealthTree Foundation has built many patient programs and over 8 integrated software platforms to help blood cancer patients learn more about their disease and better navigate their disease. Patients can find a coach, stay updated with news in patient-friendly language, find crowdsourced side effect solutions, see personalized clinical trials and treatment options, listen to disease podcasts, join community forums and educational live and online meetings, learn from experts in HealthTree University and so much more.

The wide variety of programs help patients go deep on their disease so they can become their own best advocate. With these programs and our engaged blood cancer communities of patients, families and caregivers, patients can now contribute to research in revolutionary ways. Now academic research can be performed on comprehensive data sets from thousands of patients with data that includes labs, genetics, demographics, quality of life, prior lines of therapy and more.

HealthTree Cure Hub is the only tool today used in disease research that invites patients to contribute their complete longitudinal and validated real world data to academic researchers for free so that they can develop new hypotheses and gain new insights. This allows investigators to perform research in faster and less expensive ways, saving critical time for patients who are playing “beat the clock” with terminal diseases.

Over the years, our team has grown significantly and we are now expanding into additional blood cancers, solid tumor cancers and other terminal diseases to bring faster cures to patients in need.

Our Values

Put Patients First

Build Trusted Patient Communities

Accelerate Research

Drive to a Cure

Our Mission

Our Patient-Centric Approach

Fighting cancer is a marathon and sometimes a sprint. HealthTree empowers you and your healthcare team with the knowledge you need at every key decision point. HealthTree connects the dots between you, other patients and cutting edge scientists to accelerate research towards a cure.

We are all unique individuals and so is our cancer. Patients with the same diagnosis respond to the same treatments differently. Sharing our stories will help us see similarities and personalize treatments for the best possible outcomes.

We invite you to create an account and explore the support available to you. Find a free coach, attend an educational event, find a disease specialist, or learn in HealthTree University. Find your genetic twin, see personalized treatment options or clinical trials and view a crowdsourced list of side effect solutions for common complaints.

Our Research-Centric Approach

For rare diseases like cancer, connecting patients with researchers is essential to advance a cure. But how? In the first-of-its-kind software, HealthTree invites patients to contribute to their own cure by securely sharing their diagnosis, lab values, disease genetics, patient reported outcomes, family history and more into a single place; data that is then validated against their medical record.

Researchers can then use that complete, accurate and longitudinal Real World Evidence to develop new hypotheses and gain new insights. HealthTree® also allows researchers to invite patients to participate in surveys and studies, removing recruitment barriers and accelerating their research and clinical trials for faster cures. In HealthTree, patients are willing to join, share and contribute because they receive help in return to navigate their disease.