RxVantage

rxvantage.com

RxVantage is OpenTable.com for pharma reps (and other medical vendors) looking to access physicians. The company's cloud-based platform improves patient outcomes and enhances the relationship between medical representatives and physicians’ offices. The Problem: The pharmaceutical industry spends $60 billion per year marketing, most of which is directed to the physicians who determine how the $325 billion that Americans spend each year on prescription drugs will be allocated. These marketing dollars go toward reaching docs at the point of care via sales reps that provide free samples and educational materials for patients, and medical education to doctors and their staff. All pharma brands must be in the practice if they hope to succeed. The last decade has seen an explosion of novel medical technologies and treatments, along with a corresponding increase in the number of reps promoting them. More than 130,000 reps visit the 30,000 busiest medical practices every day. These practices see value in what individual reps deliver, however, they are often overwhelmed by a community of reps that cannot organize itself to fit the practices’ schedules and priorities. In an attempt to control the rep chaos, these practices often dedicate hundreds of staff hours per year to coordinating rep visits on handwritten paper calendars and business cards. With pharma having demonstrated more than a 1000% ROI on such visits, far higher than any other sales/marketing channel, demand for access far outstrips supply. Despite this high demand, more than 30% of these appointments are abandoned by the scheduled rep and go unfilled, a paradox that occurs because: 1. Appointments are booked up to one year in advance by reps that must be in the practice. 2. Rep turnover is high, and territories and physician targets are constantly realigned. 3. Appointment information is locked inside tens of thousands of individual paper calendars. Unfortunately, the burden on staff time and the high rate of “no-show” appointments can lead a practice to reduce rep access to their doctors, or, eliminate it all together. As a result, the most effective channel pharma has to educate doctors about new treatments is becoming a victim of its own success. Enter RxVantage: Our technology enables practices to control the flow of reps in their office without utilizing staff time, which can then be re-focused on patients. Putting the practice back in control empowers them to remain open to receiving the valuable education and services that reps provide. This is especially important given studies showing that physicians not seeing reps are 4X slower to react to new information, both positive (i.e. new standard of care) and negative (i.e. product recall). In addition to keeping the practices’ doors open, RxVantage creates more opportunities for reps within each practice. By freeing the appointment data from the cages of the paper calendars, we apply our innovative technology to every appointment in order to predict and eliminate “no-shows” before they happen. By enabling other reps to book these appointments that otherwise would have been wasted, RxVantage makes the sales forces that call on our medical practices 30% more productive. More than 11,000 reps from 400 companies have used RxVantage to book over 120,000 appointments with 1,200 practices containing 4,000 high-prescribing physicians. At this scale the company has created more than $100MM in value for pharma by virtue of the 40,000+ appointments that would not have occurred in the absence of our technology. In the next 18 months, as new financing allows us to ramp this proven sales process and support the channel partnerships that we have negotiated, the value we create for pharma will exceed $1BB across a network that includes 50,000 physicians. The RxVantage platform includes a dedicated online medical rep scheduling calendar, a communication hub that enables practices to efficiently interact with reps, a sample request tool, up-to-date directory of patient assistance programs, and a drug coupon database.