The Story of Uptiv Health: The Company Building the Future of Infusion Therapy

The Story of Uptiv Health: The Company Building the Future of Infusion Therapy

The best healthcare companies are built by people who’ve seen the system break from the inside.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Torben Nielsen, CEO and Co-Founder of Uptiv Health, traced a path from learning consumer obsession at Lego to watching healthcare’s opacity problems firsthand at a major payer, to scaling a price transparency company to the Inc. 5000 list, to finally building the infusion model he knew the market needed. This isn’t a story about disruption for disruption’s sake. It’s about someone who spent nearly two decades understanding healthcare’s structural problems before building the solution.

The Education at Lego

Torben’s story begins in an unexpected place: the Danish toy company that somehow thrives while most kids operate in digital worlds. “I started my career at Lego because it’s a Danish company and I’m Danish and it really was an amazing company,” he recalled. “If I had my choice, I would go back and work for them any day.”

What made Lego special wasn’t the product. It was the obsession with understanding what customers actually need. “It’s a very creative company to work for and they pay attention to consumer needs like nobody else,” Torben explained. “It’s incredible that they’re even around in today’s world. Right. Where most kids operate in a digital world. But Lego has never done better. They’re really good at paying attention to what kids want and find latent needs.”

That education in finding latent needs and understanding what good branding means would become the foundation for everything that followed. Most healthcare founders come from medicine or insurance. Torben came from consumer products, where opacity isn’t tolerated and experience actually matters.

Finding Healthcare’s Opacity Problem

Healthcare found Torben in 2006 when Cambia Health Solutions recruited him from Xerox to help create member-centric services. The mission was straightforward but radical for the time: figure out how a payer could be more relevant to its members in the internet age.

The team decided to focus on the provider directory, but with a twist. They’d integrate it with price transparency functionality so members could see their out-of-pocket costs for different providers and hospitals before making decisions.

This seems obvious now, but in 2006 it was revolutionary. “Health care is probably the only industry, I think, where you don’t know what it’s going to cost you until 60 days after,” Torben observed. “It’s incredible that we as consumers don’t ask for that information upfront.”

For five years, they built this integrated solution, proving that healthcare could work more like every other consumer market. By 2012, Torben saw the commercial opportunity clearly. He pitched management on a spinout, got funding, and took 11 people with him to co-found HealthSparks.

The HealthSparks Hypergrowth

HealthSparks sold price transparency software as a service to health plans across the nation. The growth was explosive. Those 11 people became 100. The company landed at number 196 on the Inc. 5000 list as the second fastest growing digital healthcare company in 2016.

But hypergrowth teaches brutal lessons. “I think early on were hiring left and right and growing so fast,” Torben reflected. Managing that velocity became the defining challenge.

The lesson that stuck was about culture dilution. “When you start with 11 or even 20, right? As we started hiring early on, you still had a really good sense of what is the culture, what is true north, you know, where do we want to go?” he explained. “But as you start quickly getting from 20 to 50 to 70 to 100, all of a sudden that base of core people that know the culture of why you do certain things is getting smaller.”

The solution wasn’t hiring slower. It was completely changing how leadership communicates. “Over communicating and making sure that everybody is with you as you hire new people and they understand, you know, what true north is and why you do certain things. What your philosophy is, I think was a major learning for me.”

HealthSparks was eventually acquired in 2021, but by then Torben had already started thinking about his next chapter. He’d seen healthcare’s opacity problem from the payer side. He’d built a successful company solving part of it. But there was a bigger opportunity he couldn’t stop thinking about.

The Infusion Market’s Hidden Pain

Most people don’t think about infusion therapy until they need it. But for patients with MS, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s and colitis, severe asthma, and other chronic conditions, regular infusions become a defining part of their lives.

And the experience is universally terrible. “Nobody wants to go to a hospital, right?” Torben stated plainly. “It’s very hard to find parking. It’s hard to find the building where you’re going to get the infusion. Once you find the building, maybe it’s up on the third floor. Once you get to that third floor, then it tends to be an open room where chairs are just lined up in a row, where you almost take a number, you take a seat and then you get your infusion over the next couple of hours. There’s absolutely no privacy.”

The environment is sterile, cold, noisy. When nurses ask for medical history, twenty other patients hear everything. Questions after treatment are nearly impossible to get answered. And this is the most expensive place to receive infusion therapy.

Torben saw what others missed: this wasn’t just a bad experience. It was a structural problem that could be solved by rethinking the entire model from first principles, applying the consumer obsession lessons from Lego and the systems thinking from his payer experience.

Building Uptiv Health

Uptiv Health moves infusion out of hospitals into retail locations next to Starbucks where patients park right outside, walk into private suites with flat screen TVs and recliners, and receive personalized care for 40 to 70 percent less than hospital settings.

But the real innovation is the operational model. There’s no reception counter because they don’t need one. “We feel there are enough barriers in healthcare, we don’t need to create yet another one between us and the patient,” Torben noted.

Every patient starts in the Uptiv app, completing intake, consent forms, and preference questionnaires before arriving. “We also have our patients go through a small questionnaire where they can let us know how they want their infusion,” he explained. “So would they like one blanket with their infusion? Would they like an extra blanket? Are they bringing a friend? If so, what’s their name? Would they like coffee, tea, or soda with the infusion? Would they like snacks? Would they like Hulu or Netflix on the flat screen tv?”

Nurses greet patients at the door, already knowing who they are from the scheduled appointment, and escort them to suites equipped with their preferences. All the traditional intake tasks happen digitally before arrival, eliminating the need for reception staff while creating a premium experience.

The company also offers what they call “whole person care up to 360,” providing wraparound services like care management, care coordination, medication management, and behavioral health talk therapy. “Allowing us to view the patient coming in as more than just an infusion patient, but really a chronic patient going through a very complex healthcare journey,” Torben explained.

The Early Results

The proof is in the metrics. Patient NPS sits at 99. Referring provider NPS is 87. Over 150 unique providers send patients to just two centers in Detroit. The first center became cash flow positive in just over 12 months.

These results came from applying every lesson learned at HealthSparks. The most important decision? Spending six to seven months securing contracts with all payers before opening the first clinic. “We decided very early on that it was important for us to get on contract with all the payers so we could see patients regardless of what insurance company they had,” Torben said.

When they opened, they could treat any patient. No barriers. No friction. Just a clear path from specialist referral to patient treatment. That’s what turned 12 months into 150 referring providers and 99 NPS.

The Future: 50 to 60 Clinics Proving a New Model

Looking ahead three to five years, Torben’s vision is both ambitious and specific. “I would love to have optiv with, you know, 50 or 60 clinics across the nation and really prove out that hybrid model of in person care and virtual care creates better outcomes for the patient and will decrease costs in the system,” he explained. “I think that’s exactly what we are proving out in the Detroit market and taking that playbook across the nation would be very excited and I would love to see that happen over the next five to six years.”

This isn’t just about building more clinics. It’s about proving a thesis that hybrid care—combining retail locations with app-based coordination and virtual consultations—can deliver better outcomes at lower costs. If they’re right, they’ll have transformed a $30 billion market by showing that the hospital-based infusion model was never optimal, just entrenched.

The path from Lego to Uptiv Health spans nearly two decades and multiple companies. But the through line is clear: an obsession with finding latent consumer needs, solving systemic opacity problems, and building operational models that create better experiences at lower costs.

Torben spent the first part of his career learning how healthcare was broken. He’s spending the second part fixing it, one private suite at a time.