Over the past decade, technology has changed what it means to get a house call from a doctor. Physicians don’t show up at your door anymore—they telecommute to your home.
St. Petersburg-based startup RxLive wants to leverage the rise in telehealth to help patients get access to medications by connecting them with trained pharmacists.
“We partner with a doctor's offices to provide in-depth medication consults for patients via telehealth,” said Kristen Engelen, RxLive’s co-founder and chief pharmacy officer.
After years working as a retail pharmacist for companies like Target and Walgreens, Kristen decided to launch RxLive with her husband, Mark Engelen, who serves as CEO.
“I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing and wanted to make a bigger impact on patient care and how patients take their medications,” she said. “The time was right for us to try something new.”
RxLive provides patients with 30- to 45-minute remote consultations with a pharmacist. After the consultation, the pharmacist connects with the physician’s office to offer series of recommendations for medications, taking into account things like the patient’s condition, drug interactions, side effects and costs.
“There are emerging business models in healthcare, where, instead of being paid on a fee-for-service basis, physicians are starting to take risks around the health of their patients and are reimbursed based on the quality of care they deliver and how healthy their patients are,” said Mark, a Harvard business school graduate with experience in pharmaceutical distribution. “Pharmacists can help in that environment because medications account for a huge cost of overall health care. Pharmacists are uniquely positioned to help physicians manage both the cost and the complexity of those medications.”
RxLive raised $600,000 from angel investors last June, which enabled the startup to partner with clients in Oregon, North Carolina, Texas, New York and Illinois.
“That's the beauty of telehealth,” Kristen said. “You can serve patients all over the place.”
RxLive currently provides consultations to patients from five physician practices. Physicians pay between $50 and $100 per consultation. Although Mark doesn’t consider there to be an exact competitor in the market, other companies—such as Outcomes MTM and Aspen Health—have services that overlap with the startup’s.
RxLive aims to stay ahead of the curve by investing in the emerging science of precision medicine. Specifically, RxLive is focused on the interactions between medications and genetics. The startup offers patients a genetic test, which Mark said can help reveal what medications are most effective for a given patient and offer more personalized and targeted treatment options.
Launching in the Tampa Bay startup environment has its benefits and drawbacks. While the healthcare startup ecosystem is not as mature here as, say, Boston’s or Silicon Valley’s, RxLive has found support from former healthcare executives who’ve retired in the Tampa Bay region.
“We found a couple senior leaders who are deeply engaged in the business,” Mark said.
As the startup scales, RxLive works primarily with contractors, keeping its employee volume at a minimum. The company’s contractors include a marketing agency, software developers and about a dozen pharmacists.
