What You Should Know:
– Today House Rx, a health technology platform that empowers oncology and rheumatology physician practices with medically integrated dispensing, announced they’ve secured $30 million in financing.
– Founded by two former Flatiron Health executives, Ogi Kavazovic and Tesh Khullar the company has partnered with four medical practices and 30 prescribers since March 2021.
House Rx, a health technology platform focused on improving affordability and patient access to specialty medications, today announced it has secured $25M in Series A financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing total funding to $30 million.
Medically Integrated Dispensing: A Remedy for Patients and Providers
House Rx’s technology platform and pharmacy service enable specialty practices to offer medically-integrated dispensing, which means patients can receive both their physician and pharmacy care from one team, collaborating on a unified technology platform. Since it launched in March 2021, House Rx has partnered with four medical specialty practices and 30 prescribers in California and Washington.
Unlike infused therapies which are administered in the clinics, the burden of specialty medication access and adherence often falls on patients, who typically need to battle several large bureaucracies to gain access to their medications. These often lead to multi-week delays in treatment and much lower adherence rates compared to medications administered in clinics.
Impact of Medically-Integrated Specialty Medications
Currently, specialty medications are mainly dispensed via mail by a patient’s insurance company, not their doctor or a pharmacy a patient chooses. A growing body of research demonstrates that when patients obtain timely access to cancer treatments directly from their care team, they have better outcomes, including improved quality of life and increased survivability. To date, House Rx currently has over 30 employees, who are mostly software engineers and pharmacy operations The funding from this latest round will go towards continued investments in House Rx’s technology platform and scaling pharmacy operations.
House Rx’s technology platform helps prescribers and pharmacists collaborate more effectively via one integrated system. Built based on in-depth feedback from pharmacists and physicians, the platform is designed specifically for the management of specialty medication, and includes built-in analytics to enable continuous improvement in operational efficiency and quality of care.
The specialty medical practices that have already partnered with House Rx include Care Oncology Center, California; Sarcoma Oncology, California; Arthritis Northwest Washington; and Northwest Medical Specialties, Washington.
“The antiquated pharmacy systems developed decades ago inhibit coordinated patient care and increase costs. The current system also prevents patients from choosing where they can get their medically prescribed life-sustaining therapies,” said Tesh Khullar, President and a co-founder. “We started House Rx to make the medically integrated dispensing model the new normal in specialty pharmacy. With the right technology, and the right distribution partners, we can re-establish the partnership between physicians and pharmacists that brings a new level of transparency and patient care.”
