Experience Helped San Diego’s EHS Get First FDA-Approved Wireless Blood Glucose Meter

regulatory approval in Europe also made it easier to win FDA approval in the U.S. “It wasn’t a conscious decision,” Strobridge said, “but it ended up being easier.”

The expertise and experience of Entra Health’s co-founders also helped. Hendel, who had previously worked in Europe for two years with a telephone communications services company, had contacts with UK Trade & Investment that led to a major consulting project in England for Entra Health’s founders. The work generated early revenue for the startup, and enabled the company to begin working immediately with European regulators.

Entra Health also serves as an example of the type of wireless health startups that are taking root in San Diego, and helps to explain why San Diego is emerging as an innovation hub for mobile health.

The three co-founders have self-funded the company, as Strobridge put it, “to not give up a lot of equity and get as far down the road as we can with regulatory clearances and worldwide distribution.”

In the past year or so, Entra Health also introduced its “MyGlucoHealth Wireless” technology in Australia, Hong Kong, and South Korea. The company now has a global workforce of about 20 employees, prompting Strobridge to quip, “We’re the smallest multi-national company that I know.”

Strobridge adds, “Our strategy is to stay out front with our product road map [for MyGlucoHealth] and with the development of other products that help manage chronic diseases.”

For example, Entra Health has developed a wireless hub device for its MyGlucoHealth Wireless technology that can support several blood glucose meters simultaneously. The company also created TouchTrak, a patient management system for hospitals and healthcare practices that enables patients to check-in at a free-standing touch-screen computer display that asks a series of questions about the patient.

Strobridge says the company also has been doing a lot of work to identify potential strategic partners, and has been in discussions with others.

“A lot of non-traditional healthcare providers are quite interested in [MyGlucoHealth], and in seeing how it will play out,” he says.


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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.