Lumen Health Group names the founding members of its clinical advisory board
A nurse executive and a trauma surgeon will shape the company’s clinical direction, from how products are designed to how they are used at the bedside.
Minneapolis, Minnesota — 28 August 2026 — Lumen Health Group has named the two founding members of its clinical advisory board: Heidi Shedenhelm, DNP, RN, NE-BC, FAONL, a nurse executive who joins as clinical advisor for nursing, and Christopher Tignanelli, MD, a trauma surgeon and the company’s medical director.
Lumen works at the point where new medical technology meets clinical practice. It partners with health systems to evaluate and adopt new technology, and it represents the early-stage companies building it — advising them on the evidence they still need, supporting the research that produces it, and working to put products with strong peer-reviewed backing in front of the physicians and committees that set standards of care internationally.
The advisory board gives that work clinical leadership. Shedenhelm and Tignanelli will shape what Lumen takes on, what evidence it presses companies to produce, and how a technology is introduced on the units and in the operating rooms where it will actually be used.
Their work also runs upstream. What the field learns about how a product actually performs — clinically, operationally, and financially — feeds back into how the next generation of products gets designed and tested, before they are ever built.
Shedenhelm has spent her career across clinical practice, nursing education, and system-level change. Tignanelli is Dean of Data Science and AI at the University of Minnesota and has published more than 150 papers. He is also chief medical officer at Biometrica Health.
“I spent nearly ten years carrying products into hospitals, and the best product did not always win. What won was whoever could answer the clinical question in the room. Now we can answer it, with a nurse executive and a surgeon standing behind the answer instead of a sales pitch. I have wanted this since the day we started the company, and getting Heidi and Chris to say yes is the proudest thing we have done so far.”
Anne Carter · Founder, Lumen Health Group
“What excites me most about joining Lumen as a founding member of the clinical advisory board is the discipline behind how new technology is evaluated before it ever reaches a patient. So much promising innovation arrives at the bedside without ever being tested against the questions that matter most to nurses: does this genuinely solve a clinical problem, does it hold up under the realities of daily practice, and does it serve the patient as well as the clinician delivering the care. Lumen puts that clinical scrutiny first, and that is rare.
I have spent my career at the intersection of clinical practice, education, and system-level change, and I have seen too many well-intentioned technologies introduced without the frontline clinical perspective needed to guide their use safely and effectively. That is the gap I am here to close.
A company like Lumen is needed now because health systems and the clinicians within them are being asked to absorb more complexity with less capacity to spare. Evaluating new technology responsibly takes more than good intentions. It takes clinical judgment woven into the process from the very beginning, grounded in evidence and in what the people doing the work actually need. I am proud to help build that into Lumen from day one.”
Heidi Shedenhelm, DNP, RN, NE-BC, FAONL · Clinical Advisor, Nursing
“What excites me most about joining Lumen Health Group is the opportunity to bring genuine, data-driven transformation directly to the frontlines of healthcare. Working alongside visionaries like Anne and Brandon, who share a clear-eyed commitment to operational and clinical excellence, aligns perfectly with my drive to bridge advanced health technologies, implementation science, and daily clinical care. Healthcare is evolving rapidly, especially around healthtech innovation, data integration, and care delivery models, and Lumen provides the ideal platform to build, scale, and translate those innovations into high-impact, actionable solutions.
The healthcare industry is currently facing a massive implementation gap. We have an abundance of groundbreaking technologies, clinical trial data, and digital platforms, yet health systems regularly struggle with the friction of real-world integration, clinical adoption, and operational scaling. Modern healthcare doesn’t just need another tool; it needs an agile, interdisciplinary partner capable of bridging technical complexity with frontline clinical realities.”
Christopher Tignanelli, MD · Medical Director
About Lumen Health Group
Lumen Health Group is a field sales force for breakthrough healthcare technology. The company partners with health systems to evaluate and adopt new technology, and represents the early-stage medical device companies building it. Its people came up inside hospital teams and stay through implementation. Lumen’s work spans the evidence behind a technology, the research and guideline recognition that support it, and the design of the products that come next. Lumen is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Media contact
Anne Carter, Founder
anne@lumenhealthgroup.com
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