Im ready for a hard freeze to get rid of the outdoor allergens floating around in the air, wreaking havoc on many of us. Landmark office manager Cindy Rinehart. HIStalk Healthcare IT News and Opinion. Zo Barry is founder and CEO of Zapp. Rx of Boston, MA. Guerilla Betting System' title='Guerilla Betting System' />Tell me about yourself and the company. I founded Zapp. Rx in 2. I came at it from the patient perspective. My youngest brother was diagnosed with severe epilepsy and couldnt get on medication for almost a year and a half. This led to him to have a stutter, a learning disability, short term memory loss, and he couldnt remember what happened the day before. Counter Strike 1.6 Non Steam. It was absolutely devastating as a family. I was working on Wall Street at the time and had some familiarity with what was going on in healthcare technology. I guess you could say I became prescription obsessed. Guerilla Betting System' title='Guerilla Betting System' />Apple Inc. Chinese censors and removed all major VPN apps from the Chinabased branch of its App Store, a move which will. I started diligencing all of the problems with prescriptions, the different types of prescriptions, and tools that could be used to prescribe these medications. Ultimately, I found that there was no real product in the marketplace. I jumped into founding Zapp. Rx in 2. 01. 2. I have made it my mission and the companys mission to make it better, faster, and more transparent for high risk patients to access lifesaving medications. Why was such obvious inefficiency overlooked by other companies that might have tackled the problem I think its because the volume is so low for specialty drugs. When Meaningful Use came out, the first order of priority was to get doctors using EHRs. The second order of priority was to tackle prescriptions. E prescribing came to the market and focused on the high volume transactions. If you look at the drug market, there are 3. E prescribing focused on the ones that are spent at retail pharmacies that are covered by pharmacy benefit. Thats the bulk of the prescription volume in the United States. Specialty drugs are only 2 percent of the volume, about 7. You need a very different software and product that handles specialty prescriptions and you need a very different business model for something that accommodates only 2 percent of the market. If I had to pick a comparable company, I might say Cover. My. Meds, which brilliantly improved clinician efficiency and patient access while getting drug companies to pay for its product. Is is still reasonable to create a business that assumes drug companies will provide revenue Cover. My. Meds is very smart. My understanding is that they have two customer channels, pharma and payers. Those are the two stakeholders that have skin in the game in terms of getting patients on certain therapies and getting them on as quickly and as efficiently as possible. If you look at the other two stakeholders that are users of Cover. My. Meds doctors and pharmacies it doesnt make a lot of sense to have doctors or pharmacies pay for prior authorization. It makes more sense for the pharma companies and the payers to do that. Thats a great analogy, because we look at it very similarly. Our software connects specialists with specialty pharmacies, but our business model focuses similar to Cover. My. Meds on pharmaceutical companies and payers. How do you get your message in front of that small percentage of specialty drug prescribers that your product is good for them, they dont have to pay for it, and its easily implemented We raised venture money in order to build the company. I had very little money. Even though obviously it sounds like a lot when you raise a couple of million dollars, it goes really fast. I focused our Series A funding on getting the product right and getting the top key opinion leaders using the product. I focused on a couple of the highest volume prescribers at the top institutions and I was able to get them on board. Its sort of a waterfall effect. You start at the top and those doctors and their staff became incredibly vocal about how amazing our product was, how much time it was saving for the nurses who were managing all of this paperwork, and how much faster patients were getting onto therapy. Therefore, how much healthier the patients were. Even though it was a small subset, those doctors were able to underscore their experience. We ended up hiring a director of sales to then take those early adopters and go out and seed more of the market. Then something really amazing happened, which we did not expect at all. As more doctors adopted, they started going to pharma ad boards and saying, I will never want to write a prescription any other way other than via Zapp. Rx ever again. Its that huge moment you have to pinch yourself when youre a founder, you had this crazy vision, and you dropped everything and put all of your time and effort blood, sweat, and tears into building a company. When a doctor who is a new user who signed up r on their own says that to a pharma customer, it is just amazing. We just closed our Series B funding. In our life as a startup, our Series A funding was focused on getting the product right the right feature set, the technology, and the core partnership. Our Series B is now focused on growth. Weve hired our own sales team. Deleuze Nietzsche Y La Filosofia Pdf'>Deleuze Nietzsche Y La Filosofia Pdf. Were striking more partnerships. Were going to grow from that more organic growth to much more at scale nationwide. Technology companies often mistakenly think that a lack of technology usage in healthcare means its an easy target for disruption. What lessons have you learned in trying to breach the healthcare fortressIts definitely hard. Ive often joked in the startup ecosystem that if youre going to be a healthcare entrepreneur, you have to raise enough money to not go bankrupt while youre iterating on your idea and getting that first user. If anyone had told me it would take two and a half years from when I founded Zapp. Rx to getting that first prescription out the door, I wouldve said youre crazy. But it really did take that long. Healthcare is reactive, not proactive. The amazing thing is, if you can survive that valley of death and you can get your foot in the door, you can be much stickier. Its hard to kick you out once you get in. There are pros and cons to that. In the tech ecosystem, if you have a consumer model, its much more fickle. You get users really quickly, but you lose them just as fast. What are the good and bad aspects of finding investors, working with them as mentors, and getting them involved in the companys decisions Not all money is equal shades of green. There are investors that will come in that will add a huge amount of value. Theyll be thought partners with you. Theyll mentor you. Theyll coach you. Our board functions much more as a board that says, where are you blockedWhats going badly Whats going wrong Where are you stalled How can we help We needed to bring in more tech talent and we hired a bunch of engineers out of Google we just got backed by Google. Sonar Producer Mac Torrent. If its iterating on biopharma, we have access through GSK as one of our investors to speak with pretty much anybody on the biopharma side, any disease areas that we want to brainstorm. Whats the pain point Is our product scaled immediately from pulmonology to rheumatology, or are there some extra features we may add to accommodate a new therapeutic category Conversely, a lot of startup companies have some bad experiences with investors that are just not thought partners. They come in only looking for an ROI. Theyre investors that will not roll up their sleeves and actually do the work to help a company mature and grow and de risk. Thats where you start seeing so much of these horror stories in the news or on blogs or companies that seem to be doing really well and then all of a sudden implode.