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It's not just Walgreens and CVS that have retail health clinics. Five central Indiana Kroger supermarkets now also offer health care via a Kroger subsidiary, Tennessee-based The Little Clinic. The latest Little Clinic opened Dec. 16 at a Kroger store on College Mall Road in Bloomington. Little Clinics are also in three Indianapolis Krogers—on Southport Road, East 71st Street and West 71st Street—as well as at a Kroger in Plainfield. Like the ones in Walgreens and CVS, the Kroger clinics are staffed by nurse practitioners that diagnose and write prescriptions for such illnesses as bronchitis, sinus infections, seasonal allergies and the flu. They also perform sports physicals, health screenings and vaccinations. "Patient feedback in Indianapolis has been very positive and we are excited to grow in this region,” said Dr. Ken Patric, chief medical officer for The Little Clinic. “Our model is designed to make health care services conveniently accessible and available when patients need us, including nights and weekends."

In its first three years, the SpinUp business accelerator program at Indiana University helped launch 24 companies and helped seven of them raise more than $2.3 million in funds from government agencies and venture capital competitions. The seven companies: Anagin, founded in 2013 by Dr. Anantha Shekhar and Yvonne Lai, has raised nearly $768,000 to develop a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder that avoids harmful side effects; Emphymab Biotech, founded in 2011 by Dr. Irina Petrache and Matthias Clauss, has raised more than $436,000 to develop a drug to treat emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; YC Bioelectric, founded in 2012 by Hiroki Yokota and Stanley Yung-Ping Chien, has raised nearly $358,000 to develop a faster, more accurate and less costly way to perform the Western blot lab technique, used to detect and analyze protein samples; Arrhythmotech, which was founded in 2012 by Dr. Peng-Sheng Chen and Shein-Fong Lin, has raised nearly $263,000 to develop a non-invasive technology to monitor nerve activity and electrocardiogram signals; Refer2Input, founded in 2013 by Ken Yoshida, has raised nearly $261,000 to monitor bioelectric signals from various areas of the body in a single unit; EmotEd LLC, founded in 2012 by Dawn Neumann, has raised nearly $245,000 to develop a therapeutic video game to treat emotional deficits stemming from traumatic brain injury; and Sophia Therapeutics, founded in 2011 by Rajesh Khanna, has raised $10,000 to treat neuropathic pain.

Researchers at Purdue University and other schools have received $1.6 million from the National Institutes of Health to create three “virtual patients” to help medical, nursing and pharmacy students learn how to counsel patients to quit smoking. Karen Hudmon, a professor of pharmacy practice at Purdue, leads the project, which will develop teaching and learning tools that are made available free to health professional schools and the public. The "virtual patients" will possess detailed histories and personalities and will respond to students' questions in real time. Students can “counsel” the virtual patients online at any time to practice what they learn in class. "Even at the best schools, only about six hours are dedicated to training students to approach and counsel a patient who smokes," Hudmon said in a prepared statement. " Clinicians' confidence in their ability to provide tobacco cessation counseling is an important predictor of whether they will integrate routine tobacco cessation counseling into their professional practice." The new tools will first be part of a pilot program at Albany Medical College and then at six additional schools, including two medical, two nursing and two pharmacy programs.