After helping to get its start through Health Wildcatter’s accelerator program, a telehealth and digital pharmacy startup is looking to bring some of its business back to North Texas.
Over the past year, Healthy Quit, a Boston-based tobacco cessation startup has expanded into a new line of business offering digital pharmacy services, and through a new partnership with Dallas-based River it is looking to expand its physical presence in DFW with a new hub for its pharmacy services.
“I definitely knew selling a pharmacy as a service is… a hard concept from the revenue perspective, so I thought to myself, ‘Instead of partnering with a pharmacy, why don’t we own our own pharmacy,” Healthy Quit co-founder Yinka Ojutalayo told NTX Inno.
Healthy Quit was launched in 2018, joining the 2019 Health Wildcatters cohort, which supplied it with its initial funding. Through the company’s program, patients are able to set goals to quit tobacco, which Healthy Quit tries to meet with telehealth checkups, prescriptions and follow up visits. With its app, Healthy Quit is able to track a user’s progress and adjust the patient’s quitting program with machine learning.
Since leaving the Health Wildcatter program, Healthy Quit has gone on to run a three month-long pilot program of its tech with Access Primary Care and leased a physical space in the Greater Boston Area for its three-person team.
“Tobacco cessation for us, we don’t believe people need to have that negative stigma,” Ojutalayo said. “We take a different approach to it and say, ‘We’re honored to go through this journey with you as you're trying to quit tobacco.’”
However, one of the biggest changes for Healthy Quit is the launch of its adjacent digital pharmacy business Health Haven RX, which is based in New Hampshire. The company received approval for the pharmacy earlier this summer and is now licensed in 10 states – Texas being one of those – with plans to be licensed in all 50 in the next six months. Beyond allowing Healthy Quit to run its own pilots and studies in-house, Healthy Haven RX has enabled the company to partner with other early-stage telehealth startups to provide pharmacy services to their customers.
“It has always been that yes, we will dispense smoking cessation products but we can dispense any medication whatsoever,” Ojutalayo said.
One of the first partnerships for Health Haven RX back where the company got its start, with Dallas-based health care startup River, which is also a Health Wildcatter alumni and formerly went by the name Mountain Health Technologies. Through the partnership, Health Haven RX will deliver birth control products to River customers in the area.
“Our goal, really our mission, is to empower our partners to be able to provide affordable medications to their patients,” Ojutalayo said.
Ojutalayo said that while Healthy Quit and Health Haven RX have always been focused on the telehealth space, it has seen an increased demand due to the pandemic. And with partnerships like the one with River, it hopes to help other remote health care startups provide their patients with services while also growing its own business through customer connections.
Through the partnership with River, Healthy Quit and Health Haven RX are looking to create a physical presence in North Texas with a hub for its pharmacy delivery service to support future partnerships in the region. While there is no word on how many positions the companies will create with the hub, Ojutalayo said they are currently eyeing Dallas and McKinney for possible locations in the next year to 18 months.
“We hope to come back to Dallas… to have roots where we kind of started, to be able to give back to the community that has helped us a lot,” Ojutalayo said.
The companies eventually plan to open up other hubs across the country as it continues to grow. Ojutalayo said they are currently looking to raise a new round that will help with the expansion.
“We were able to get to that point and we started thinking our goal is not just to be in New Hampshire or the Greater Massachusetts area but is to actually spread our wings across the entire United States,” Ojutalayo said.
Healthy Quit and Health Haven RX are one of a number of telehealth-related startups that have seen growth during the pandemic. Locally, health care and biotech companies have seen increased investment activity, with companies like Taysha Gene Therapies’ $181 million September IPO and MyTelemedicine landing a McKinney EDC grant to more than double its 23-person workforce in the next three years. Also this year, other smoking cessation startups like London-based Quit Genius have seen multi-million dollar funding rounds in recent months.
“People are struggling, really struggling to pay for their medications, so our focus not just on telehealth but our focus is also on providing low-cost, affordable medication to patients, that kind of works hand-in-hand with what is the effect of COIVD,” Ojutalayo said.
