Coolest Things Made in Missouri 2026: TLC splint

Liz Szuba

Owner: Pete Vallino
Employees: 8
Founded: 1991
Web: IVHouse.com
2025 Revenue: Undisclosed
Product Pricing: Less than $10
Why is this the coolest product made in Missouri? The idea was born and raised in Missouri, but it benefits people worldwide.

Hours spent in the emergency room showed Lisa Vallino that there had to be a better way to protect IVs after insertion than the makeshift covers created by resourceful nurses. So Vallino went into business with her mother and started I.V. House 35 years ago, launching UltraDome, an IV site protector, as its first product. Other products followed, including the TLC splint, an arm board with see-through openings.

SBJ: How did I.V. House get started?
Liz Szuba, vice president: Our founder was a pediatric ER nurse. She worked here in St. Louis at Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital, which is a Level 1 trauma center. They’re super busy, and the nurses found themselves cutting up medicine cups and urine cups to create little protective site covers because kids were coming in, they were pulling their IVs out, and as a nurse she [knew] there has to be a way to protect these IVs. There was nothing on the market, so she invented this product 35 years ago that was our original product, the UltraDome. She identified the need for a new arm board, so that’s how the TLC splint was born.

SBJ: Lisa Vallino founded the company with her mother?
Szuba: Yes, Lisa was the nurse with the invention, and her mother, Betty Rozier, had previous business experience. She had run her own business, and Lisa went to her mom and said, hey, I have this idea, you have the knowledge on how to create a product, how to run a business, let’s do this together, so it was a mother-daughter duo for the first 15 years.

SBJ: How does the TLC splint work, and what makes it different?
Szuba: The TLC splint is what we have nicknamed a next-generation arm board. Anytime a kid has an IV in an area of flexion or anywhere that bends – typically it’s the hand, the foot or the elbow – you want to stabilize that joint to prevent any sort of complications with their IV. Traditional arm boards are flat rectangles. They are not anatomically designed. You can’t see what’s going on, so a nurse will apply an arm board and then tape the heck out of it and hope for the best. We realized excessive tape is not good for kids. It’s causing injuries. There’s a lack of visibility. So I.V House said we are going to develop a splint that is tailored to each extremity that has these see-through openings on the other side, because when you’re assessing an IV, it’s super important that you are looking at the whole extremity, not just where the catheter is inserted, but the entire limb. You’re comparing it to the other limb to make sure that there’s no redness, swelling, irritation, any of that, so we called it the TLC splint which stands for touch, look and compare. That actually came out of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. And we have their permission to utilize that as our product name. They actually collaborated with us in the (research and development) process. It’s specific to each extremity, and those openings allow faster, easier site assessments, and if something is starting to go wrong, since nurses can see the entire limb, they’re detecting injuries much sooner rather than later if they were using a traditional board where you can’t see what’s happening.

SBJ: What does the future look like?
Szuba: I see us coming out with new products. I see us expanding in children’s hospitals. I see us expanding into the adult world much more so than we already are. We say this is just a tip of the iceberg. We sell globally right now but on a very, very small scale. We have some international distributors that send product overseas, but I see I.V. House just being globally the standard of care.