RxLightning, a healthcare expertise firm targeted on the specialty medicine enrollment course of, has closed a $3 million seed spherical led by enterprise capital agency HealthX Ventures.
Along with the funding, the corporate introduced that Brad Fluegel and Taha Jangda are becoming a member of its board. Jangda is a common accomplice at HealthX Ventures, and Fluegel is a principal at BMF Advisors.
Launched solely 15 months in the past, the funding and addition to its board will assist the corporate commercialize its enterprise, mentioned CEO Julia Regan in a telephone interview. RxLightning gives a brand-agnostic platform that helps suppliers streamline the method of finishing enrollments for specialty medicine.
Sufferers recognized with ailments like most cancers usually want specialty medicines. To get them entry to those medicine, suppliers should fill out paperwork and interact in a handbook course of that always includes quite a lot of backwards and forwards with the pharmacies, Regan mentioned. Consequently, it could take sufferers weeks and even months to get the medicines they want.
RxLightning’s platform allows suppliers to submit enrollments for sufferers rapidly and effectively to any specialty pharmacy.
“As an alternative of the supplier having to seek out the piece of paper that they should fill out, they’ll go to our platform and kind a drug title and see all of the paperwork that they should fill or the choices they should full,” Regan mentioned.
The platform goals to make the method extra even environment friendly by enabling suppliers to seize affected person consent digitally.
RxLightning plans to make use of the funds it has raised in two methods, Regan mentioned. The primary is to develop its gross sales crew and get the phrase out about its platform. Second, the funds will probably be used to carry on people that may join the corporate with specialty pharmacies.
“Many gamers in healthcare are attacking the problem of prior authorization for specialty medicine, however now we have to go after a much wider downside and get to the foundation trigger,” newly put in board member Jangda mentioned, in a information launch. “That’s what Julia and the RxLightning crew are doing. They’re reworking one of many final bastions of paper-based medication — the initiation of specialty drug remedy.”
Lowering the price of specialty medicine can be top-of-mind for the business. Area of interest distributors that lately entered the market are promising vital financial savings for payers in the event that they “carve-out” specialty pharmacy companies from built-in pharmacy advantages administration — however their guarantees are “significantly exaggerated,” wrote Prem Shah, government vp of specialty and product innovation at CVS Well being, in an article for MedCity Information.
Not solely that, however these carve-outs may lead to further protection determinations and extra affected person and supplier confusion, Regan mentioned.
“Separating protection within the type of [a] carve-out for under the costly specialty medicines merely for [a] rebate or community administration in all probability doesn’t really take prices out of the system however most definitely complicates it and finally there’s a higher probability of the affected person being caught within the center and finally struggling,” she mentioned.
Thus, for RxLightning, effectively gathering and routing related data from the clinicians to pharmacies and getting sufferers on remedy as rapidly and precisely as doable is vital, no matter carve-outs, Regan added.
Picture: Stas_V, Getty Photos