The app acts as a guide from diagnosis through treatment through remission. “We’re not trying to do second opinions or clinical treatment,” Pellegrini said. Instead, the app offers suggestions and manages aspects such as mental health, diet and nutrition, lifestyle, and how to deal with stress and anxiety. Meanwhile, the various coaches and clinicians using the app can see all of their patients that need help today, as well as those who can wait a little bit.

For example, if a patient is starting chemotherapy, the app will tell them how they should be eating and come up with a diet plan. “It’s all in partnership with the clinicians,” Pellegrini said.

How Jasper Health came to be

Jasper Health was incubated out of a venture firm in New York called Redesign Health, Pellegrini said. The idea came from his cofounder, Kira Wampler, who also worked for Redesign, after serving as chief marketing officer for startups such as Lyft and Trulia. “She had a loved one going through this very terrible experience,” he said. “When this experience happened, she said, ‘I can’t believe there’s not a digital experience to help people in these times right away.’”

For its first year, the firm was headquartered in New York, but Wampler knew she needed a partner who knew the digital health side. “So that’s where she recruited me,” Pellegrini said.

Then two years ago April – perhaps you remember the time – Pellegrini took over as cofounder and CEO.

“We still work almost every day brainstorming,” Pellegrini said.

Pellegrini’s involvement

So how did Pellegrini get involved? And what’s the connection to Yellow Pine?

“I live there part-time,” Pellegrini explained. “My wife’s family actually homesteaded Yellow Pine,” and he and his wife have three cabins of the original homestead. They’re there almost every weekend, even in the winter – when it’s a 4 ½-hour single-lane drive from Eagle – and they live there full time during the summer.

On Pellegrini ‘s grandmother’s side, his family is from New Meadows and worked at the Stibnite mine, not far from Yellow Pine. “My family has been around these parts since the very early days,” he said. While Pellegrini himself traveled around in the military to Tacoma, Chicago, and Texas, “my wife and family have always had property in Yellow Pine,” he said. “Our goal was, ‘how do we get closer to Yellow Pine.’”

Pellegrini has been involved in digital health care for more than 20 years, he said. It includes stints working for the American Cancer Society and Microsoft Health, followed by becoming an executive for Walgreens in Chicago. He built their digital health strategy, then worked for the founder of FitBit, followed by CVS Health and Aetna.

“When this came along, it was all of my former jobs rolled into one,” he said.

The venture firm knew Pellegrini from his previous positions, primarily the Microsoft one, and they knew his track record. “Digital health is a very small world,” he said. So they offered him the position running the company.