Rick Redalen, MD born March 13, 1943, is a retired American physician, entrepreneur and philanthropist.  Dr. Redalen has practiced medicine for nearly fifty years.  His medical career focused on family medicine, general surgery and obstetrics.  After retiring as a physician, Redalen began to focus on ways to improve the quality and delivery of patient care and information.  Exit Care was founded in 1996 and was a software company formed for the purpose of providing patient education. ExitCare over the next fifteen years became the premier model and gold standard in the medical industry for patient information and education. ExitCare educational materials were provided in a dozen languages and provided patient education to seven of the largest healthcare IT companies in the world. After capturing 60% of the American Hospital market, ExitCare became international in scope and was continuing to grow when Redalen sold the company to Elsevier, a publishing company based in Amsterdam in September 2012.

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In 2012 Redalen founded Quest Global Benefits (Quest) to help businesses and individuals navigate the changing health insurance market resulting from the Affordable Care Act. Quest was founded as a humanitarian effort to attempt to stem the rising tide of unaffordable health care costs. It was amazing to Redalen that the ACA (Affordable Care Act) was so named in a time when escalation of health care for the majority of Americans is completely un-affordable. Its humanitarianism is based on the founding premise of Quest. That is, the company is formed for the sole purpose of slashing the price of health care to the American Public. Quest has the resolution to ensure that the majority of profits will go to serving our fellow man and ensure that health care is available to all people at reasonable costs.

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Early Years and Education

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Rick Redalen MD was born in 1943 in a middle class family in Spokane, Washington.  His parents Raymond Edward Redalen, an electronic repair technician, and Gwendolyn Sylvia Redalen, a home maker, were of Norwegian decent.  Rick was the eldest of the Redalen’s five children. Cheryl, Ronald, Sally, and Susan were the names of his siblings.  During the first several years of Rick’s life the Redalen family moved around the mid western portion of the United States until settling in Williston, ND.  As practicing Lutherans, the early influence of the Christian faith has remained with Rick Redalen MD throughout his life and has been the inspiration for many of his philanthropic works. Redalen was an accomplished student athlete and a member of the football, wrestling, track and swim teams at Williston High School.

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Redalen began work on his Pre-Medical degree at Minot State College immediately after high school.  Working his way through college as a janitor and evening supervisor at a local bookstore, Redalen participated in few extra circular activities and focused on raising his young family.  In 1966, Redalen received his Bachelor of Medical Sciences from the University of North Dakota before continuing receiving his Doctorate in Medicine from the University Of Nebraska School of Medicine in 1968.

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He continued on in his training as an intern for St. Benedicts Hospital in Ogden, UT, located just North of Salt Lake City.  Upon completion of his internship, Redalen traveled to Princeton, Minnesota, where his education continued under the mentoring of by Dr. Arthur Lundholm who was board certified in General Surgery, Pathology and Urology. The broad medical practice style Redalen became accustomed to in Princeton, ND had a profound impact on his all-inclusive view of the medical profession

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Rick Redalen MD left Princeton, Minnesota in 1975 to serve as an Assistant Professor and Director in the Department of Family Medicine at the University Minnesota. Preferring to spend time with patients, Redalen returned the family practice in Dubuque, Iowa. at the request of a colleague.  Redalen spent eight years establishing a thriving medical practice in Dubuque before joining the Mid-American Medical Associates Team in Madison, Wisconsin. There Redalen helped oversee and direct the management of twenty-two emergency rooms in Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin.  After two years in emergency room management, Redalen returned to his practice in Dubuque.  He remained there for nearly eight years until the passing of his wife Renee on February 29th 1988.

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In 1994 Rick Redalen and Lorraine (Lori) O’Neal were married. Lori was a great and elementary part of the formation of the company later known as ExitCare. Lori had a huge humanitarian heart and played an integral part in encouragement in the early years of the company when struggles at times were monumental.

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While working as an emergency room physician in understaffed hospital emergency rooms, Redalen became acutely aware of the lack of uniformity, clarity and consistency of discharge information.  Many patients had a difficult time understanding instructions provided by the nursing staff and physicians upon leaving the emergency department and would often return with concerns or questions about their recovery process.  In 1996 Redalen returned to St. Paul, MN to found QuestRx which later adopted and registered the name ExitCare which name was coined by John Helmeke and Chuck Krejci. Exitcare became one of the largest providers of patient information in the United States before spreading internationally.

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Philanthropic Work

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Redalen first joined the Christian Medical Society in 1967 while he was a junior in medical school at the University of Nebraska. In the past decade, Redalen made his first mission trip as a Christian missionary to Koutiala, Mali, http://www.samaritanspurse.org/medical/mission-hospitals-koutiala-women-and-childrens-hospital-mali/, in North Central Africa. He jokingly says if you do not know where Koutiala is, it is 200 miles south of Timbuktu. Redalen has since traveled to dozens of countries in South and Central America and Africa. Rick and Lori Redalen worked with numerous charities over the past decade and served them in various ways. Just a few of the charities include: Here’s Life Africa, http://hereslifeafrica.com/whatwedo,  (former board member),Art For Animals, http://www.aelondonstudio.com/  to preserve African heritage through the use of art. One of the primary concerns of Art for Animals is to help eliminate poaching and protect and preserve the indigenous animal populations, Cure International https://cure.org/about/, an organization that builds hospitals around the world, Trinity’s Angels, www.TrinitysAngels.org, who provide care and feeding of Peruvian orphans and evangelize to the indigenous people of the Amazon Basin, Words of life, http://wordsoflifeministry.org/about-us/,  a ministry run for years by Ray Skaggs who walks through Peruvian jungles ministering the word of God to natives. These are some of the ministries cared for by the Redalens in addition to countless others that care for animals Humane Society,www.humanesociety.org ASPCA  www.aspca.org and numerous others that help the impoverished people in the U.S. and world.