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Friday, June 5, 2009
RxVantage takes $500K in Slater Funds for doctor scheduling app
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Providence-based medical software startup RxVantage Inc. this week took in a half-million-dollar investment from Rhode Island’s venture capital arm, the Slater Technology Fund.
The company is now looking for additional investors in the next 90 days to pony up another round of between $6 million and $8 million, said Greg Gilman, RxVantage founder and CEO. RxVantage makes web-based applications that allow doctors and other medical providers and pharmaceutical companies to easily share information and coordinate schedules.
“Our system allows medical providers to create an account and put in their available time when they can receive informational and educational visits,” explained Gilman. “The reps can view and schedule these appointments remotely without physically having to be in the physician’s office.” The application enables doctors to book appointments as much as a year in advance, said Gilman. The system then requires that all appointments are confirmed in advance by reps, and in the event an appointment is canceled for any reason, the appointment is made available to all other reps in the area, he said.
There have been other doctor-to-pharmaceutical company applications before, but “nothing that represented a complete solution that brought value to everyone in the chain,” he said. It will save pharma companies several billion dollars per year in lost productivity, and save doctors massive amounts of time due to cancellations and no-shows, he said. The application has already been tested in Rhode Island and Massachusetts and achieved a 90 percent acceptance rating among the early adopters, the company said.
One example of a similar web-based time management service came from Boston-based PreferredTime Inc., whose CEO was Stefania Nappi, a 2007 Mass High Tech Woman To Watch. Gilman said their system, however, was mostly focused to assist doctors. The company went out of business about a year ago, said Gilman, who emphasized that RxVantage is easier for the reps to access and use.
The designers of the RxVantage application had a very good sense of what the medical industry needed, said Thorne Sparkman, managing director of the Slater Technology Fund. Often, entrepreneurs are good at their technology, but don’t have the right feel for the potential customer. On the other hand, one of the RxVantage founders had actually “lived the problem of marketing to doctors’ offices.”
Sparkman said: “This is a case where it was ‘problem solved.’”
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