What You Should Know:
- RxLightning, creator of the industry’s first comprehensive platform for streamlining specialty medication access and affordability, today announced that it closed a $17.5 million Series A investment to support the company’s growth and further remove barriers to life-saving therapies.
- The round was led by LRVHealth, with participation from McKesson Ventures and existing investors Novartis (dRx Capital), Onco360 (BrightSpring Health Services), Hearst Ventures, and HealthX Ventures. This investment brings RxLightning’s total capital raised since inception to $20.5 million.
Redefining Specialty Patient Access and Onboarding
With RxLightning, healthcare providers – from those practicing at independent clinics to large health systems – leverage a streamlined workflow to complete the multi-step specialty medication onboarding process in a matter of minutes. The company’s MedAccess Ecosystem is an integrated platform that provides transparency into the patient access and affordability journey for doctors, patients, specialty pharmacies, and drug manufacturers, reducing administrative burden and enabling onboarding support in real time.
“Many people have tried to fix the slow, manual specialty medication onboarding process, but they’ve approached it with a single drug, pharmacy, or isolated part of the process in mind. RxLightning is the first to provide an end-to-end solution that covers the entire market – from every medication and destination to every stakeholder in the process,” said Julia Regan, CEO and founder at RxLightning. “This new investment will help us further scale our medication access capabilities, support infrastructure and personnel growth, and maintain the unprecedented rate at which we’ve grown our partner base – all while receiving strategic guidance from leading industry experts.”
The specialty medication market represents more than half of total drug spending in the U.S., reaching $301 billion in 2021, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Despite this growing reliance on advanced therapies, accessing these medications remains a slow, manual, and costly process. Every specialty medication currently requires a custom paper form that a provider or patient must complete. These forms are then pushed through a manual process outside the electronic health record (EHR), which can result in significant care delays.
RxLightning is the single destination to enroll patients for any specialty medication – brand or generic – at any specialty pharmacy. The company has digitized forms for over 1,200 specialty drugs with custom logic and smart-pick menus, and continuously adds forms for new medications as they enter the market. In addition, the modular platform automates the FDA’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) program, confirms patient eligibility and coverage, and streamlines enrollment in financial assistance programs to further eliminate access barriers. With RxLightning, providers and patients can complete the entire onboarding process in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks.
