Jennifer Janke Returns Home to Women’s Health

Alomere Health’s Women’s Health team is welcoming back a familiar face. Jennifer Janke, CNM, WHNP, spent 17 years building her career in Alexandria before moving away, she’s back where it all began.

Jennifer’s path into healthcare started with her grandmother, a nurse at Douglas County Hospital for 43 years. Jennifer trained as an ER nurse at Douglas County Hospital, where she got to know many of the surgeons her grandmother had worked alongside for decades—and had a bit of a head start with them. “I had an automatic in,” she said. “They just happened to like me because I was Lorraine’s granddaughter.” From there, she discovered her true calling. “I truly started to feel this pull for women’s healthcare,” she said. “It just felt right.”

After becoming Alexandria’s first women’s health nurse practitioner, Jennifer went back to school to add a midwifery certification, allowing her to care for women through preventative health, pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum. She practiced in Alexandria for 12 years before her family moved to the Fargo-Moorhead area, where she spent the next 15 years at a large health system.

For Jennifer, coming back to Alexandria means coming back to the kind of medicine she loves most.

In a larger health system, she said, that personal connection gets lost in layers of administration. Alexandria offers something different—something she calls “very refreshing.”

“What’s unique about Alomere’s team is that everybody is very supportive of each other,” she said. “Midwives and physicians work together to make sure each patient sees the right provider for her needs—whether that’s a midwife for a low-risk pregnancy or an OB for higher-risk.”

While Jennifer is passionate about delivering babies—she jokes about someday becoming a “granny midwife,”—her care doesn’t stop there. She has a special interest in helping women navigate perimenopause, menopause, and hormone therapy—an area of women’s health she says has historically been overlooked.

“It’s really an honor to be invited into a woman’s most intimate time of their life,” she said. “Women need somebody by their side.”

Jennifer and her husband, Chris (also an Alexandria-area native) are excited to be closer to family on both sides. Their two daughters are college students at UND. Outside of work, Jennifer stays active with long-distance running, sporting events, and plenty of reading.