By Abby Bulger – Digital Reporter, Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal
Dr. Suzin Cho is uniting 10 women’s health clinics across the Twin Cities under one name: Almara
Almara Women’s Health, launched earlier this month, was born out of two main goals: to provide by-women for-women health care while also helping smaller women’s focused practices survive by working together under one brand.
“We created Almara because the health care system too often flattens what it means to be a woman,” Cho, president of Almara, said in a recent statement.
The 10 combined practices offer clients a wide variety of specialized clinics and over 65 diverse medical professionals, covering the spectrum of all-ages women’s care in one database. Services include primary care, reproductive health and family planning, breast cancer programs, pregnancy care, menopause and hormonal care.
Having been a practitioner at OBGYN Specialists in Burnsville since 1999, Cho is intimately familiar with the struggles of working at a “mom and pop individual practice,” as she put it in an interview with the Business Journal.
“We really want to have a presence in the marketplace against the bigger names, the Allinas, the Park Nicollets, and the only way we could have that loud a voice was to join together,” Cho explained.
Under Almara, Cho’s practice and the nine other women’s health clinics benefit from joint HR and marketing practices, among other medical programs that would not have been feasible without the umbrella company.
The clinics under the Almara umbrella are:
- Burnsville – OBGYN Specialists
- Burnsville urogynecology – Gerten Urogynecology
- Edina 66th Street – Haugen OB/GYN
- Edina France Avenue – Associates in Women’s Health & OBGYN Specialists
- Edina maternal fetal – Maternal Fetal Consultants
- Edina OGI – Obstetrics, Gynecology & Infertility (OGI)
- Edina urogynecology – Gerten Urogynecology
- Maple Grove OGI – Obstetrics, Gynecology & Infertility (OGI)
- Plymouth – Haugen OB/GYN
- Woodbury – Adefris & Toppin Specialists
The clinics also share clinical programs that cover a maternal fetal center, gestational diabetes, high-risk breast cancer screening and, soon, a lactation specialist. These offerings would not have been available to women attending any individual clinic before Almara — the collective allows for more room to grow and expand services together.
“Because we’re physician-owned, we are talking to patients every day,” Cho said. “I think we have a more direct access to assessing what patients’ needs are and filling them.”
Almara is taking a page out of Twin Cities Orthopedics’ book, an orthopedic collective with nearly 40 participating clinics across the state.
“I mean, they’re huge,” Cho said. “But what you probably don’t know is that 10, 15, 20 years ago, they were like us. And for the same reason they [asked], could we have more marketing power if we joined together?”
Both Twin Cities Orthopedics and Almara are owned by the same parent company; Infinite Health Collaborative, or i-Health. Based in Minnesota, the company is behind many such collectives of specialized private practices, including family practice, plastic surgery and endocrinology groups.
As the collective is less than a month old, Cho and her fellow specialists and clinics are trying to find their footing, but she says Almara has a growth mindset. Moving forward, Almara plans to look for the gaps in the women’s health market and identify those being under-served.
To read the article at Minneapolis St Paul Business Journal, please click here
If you’d like to download the article in a PDF, click here.
About Almara Women’s Health
Launched in June 2025, Almara is a physician-led women’s health collaboration built to support whole-woman health through every stage of life. From the first clinic opening in the 1950s, Almara has been providing whole care services to three generations of women and counting.
Today, Almara’s 65+ physicians and advanced practitioners across ten clinics in the Twin Cities serve 45,000+ women and deliver 3,000+ babies annually. With expansive views of womanhood and OBGYN services, Almara welcomes women of all ages and experiences to connect with the information, experts, and services needed for life.
Reach out to info@helloalmara.com or request an appointment here.
