Digital health company ZappRx, which provides an online platform that speeds up the specialty drugs prescribing process, is expanding. Around a month after having been deployed at Tufts Medical Center, the ZappRx platform will be in use in two more locations, this time outside Massachusetts.
The company let BostInno know that they are live in the Phoenix location of Arizona Pulmonary Specialists, the largest private practice treating pulmonary hypertension, as well as the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, CA.
In Arizona, the platform works in two disease areas. In California, the platform works only in one disease area.
Before digging further, let’s take a step back. Specialty drugs are rare medications treating a chronic, complex or progressive disease (the kind of disease that you may never have heard about, luckily for you, unless you have it). Usually, getting medications for these types of diseases requires additional administrative steps. What ZappRx does is connecting physicians, pharmacists and patients through a platform that reduces the paperwork involved. Bottom line: The company provides a service that gets specialty drugs prescriptions fulfilled as quickly as possible.
In Arizona, the platform can now be used to help patients with two rare pulmonary conditions, Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH) and Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF). In California, the platform works for patients with PAH.
"We decided to target both Arizona Pulmonary Associates and Harbor-UCLA for several reasons," Sherri Hendricks, Director of Provider Sales at ZappRx, wrote in an email. "One is for their expertise in treating PAH. They are both considered pioneers in the field and are renowned for their research contributions in the pulmonary hypertension community."
The company, which didn’t disclose the number of cases doctors have been treating with the support of the platform at Tufts, said that the reception of the service has been extraordinary. "We are told that ‘Zapp’ has become a verb in the office — ‘I just zapped that patient’ — meaning they completed the prescription and prior authorization, which is really fun," Karen Tirozzi, VP of Solutions at ZappRx, wrote in an email.
ZappRx closed $25 million in Series B funding in April. Qiming US Healthcare Fund, a venture capital firm based in Seattle, led the round.
In the future, the company is planning to support for all specialty conditions, including neurology, oncology, rheumatology and gastroenterology conditions.
