Southern Indiana-based RxLightning has inked a new partnership with an prescribing platform, expanding the company’s reach.
The partnership is with First Databank Inc. (FDB), a San Francisco-based databank of drug knowledge meant to help healthcare professionals make decisions. The product is called FDB Vela, a cloud native electronic prescribing network that aims to offer seamless flow in prescribing medications between critical medication prescription information, benefits verification, and clinical decision support between prescribers, payers, pharmacies and other constituents.
RxLightning was recently named one of Louisville Business First’s Startups to Watch for 2022. It’s a free-to-provider digital platform that streamlines the specialty medication enrollment process in every therapeutic area. Its goal is to reduce paperwork, eliminate mistakes, streamline communication and accelerate the time to life-altering therapies for patients.
Julia Regan, RxLightning co-founder and CEO, said she wants to get RxLightning further into provider workflows, which as a startup is hard to do, because provider networks are fragmented, and different relationships are needed to make that possible.
FDB’s core business is in the majority of electronic health record systems, Regan said.
“By partnering with them to take our technology into the workflow to reach providers and those technology solutions. It just makes everything quicker,” she said.
When FDB is in an electronic health record system and RxLightning’s capabilities are turned on, a provider can prescribe a specialty medication and the request would go through RxLightning’s network. The program then can identify different clinical information or opportunities for patient support services or patient assistance programs.
RxLightning presents through FDB in the electronic health record at the point of prescribing, allowing providers to submit paperwork at the same time.
Overall, Regan said it was an exciting partnership.
“You could have technology that could change something, but if you can't reach the people that would be the users of it, it doesn't matter how great the technology is or what the outcome is for patients,” Regan said. “This really helps us, on a large scale, be able to touch more providers. The more providers you touch, the more patients you touch, and the more people you actually impact.”
Regan declined to estimate the financial impact the partnership would have on her company.
Regan is open to RxLightning partnering with other health tech companies in the future, but they won’t necessarily look like the partnership with FDB. She said the industry is fragmented, so partnerships with other companies that are likeminded and aligned are key for any company to achieve mass scale.
RxLightning employs 20 people full time, but Regan expects that number to double by the end of the year. She said her company is gearing up for growth. More than 30,000 providers actively use RxLightning, according to Regan. Its provider base is mainly allergy immunology, dermatology and oncology specialists.
Regan declined to share RxLightning’s total revenue to date.
The product has been in market for about 13 months, Regan said.
“People ask me, ‘What's your greatest accomplishment?’ And for me, it's just that we've proven that we could actually change the speed in which patients get their medicines, and now it's all about growing and reaching more providers,” she said. “The FDB relationship is really important to help achieve that mission of expansion.”
