RxREVU Modernizes Prescription Management

Digital Health Platform Informs Prescribing Decisions

In the center of Denver’s construction chorus—a sign of the city’s recent economic boom—CEO Carm Huntress, and his team at RxRevu have their own renovation project underway. They want to overhaul how healthcare providers prescribe medication. Their digital health solution streamlines medication choice, reduces unintended drug interactions, surfaces lower cost alternatives and improves patient care by giving doctors the most up-to-date information available to prescribe the most effective, clinically appropriate medication.

“We help providers make more informed prescription decisions by bringing data, analytics and other information to the point-of-care,” said Huntress.

RxRevu CEO Carm Huntress and Head of Research and Clinical Outcomes, Weston Blakeslee, Ph.D., in downtown Denver.

An entrepreneur who helped launch four other technology companies, Huntress was inspired to start RxRevu in 2013 after reading a physician reference guide by Dr. Kevin O’Brien, a pulmonologist, who is now RxRevu’s Chief Medical Officer. The book ranked medications by cost and quality. Huntress quickly decided the book’s complex, ever-evolving information would work best on a technology platform.

He rented a desk at Galvanize, an incubator in downtown Denver with the space, resources, and mentoring he needed to work out the details.

“Denver has a fantastic early-stage startup community and a strong group of digital health companies,” said Huntress.

RxRevu secured private funding in 2014 to build version one of the platform. In 2015, the company partnered with Miramont Family Medicine in Fort Collins, Colo., to test it. Originally, Huntress planned to design the platform for direct-to-patient use, but that changed. The pilot saved patients about 5 percent on prescription medication costs.

“That was a breakthrough moment,” said Huntress. He realized that the technology would serve healthcare practices and patients best by putting it into the hands of providers.

RxRevu’s platform optimizes prescription decision making by sorting through real-time medication data such as cost, effectiveness, side effects, benefit data and drug interactions and then produces a list of medications covered by the patient’s health insurance directly in the patient’s electronic health record. It suggests medications to the doctor, who can then make a choice based on best practices.

“It’s a single click into the tool, they see the recommendations, then it’s a single click to order a prescription,” said Huntress, highlighting the user experience of never leaving the standard workflow to access this Prescription Decision Support (the company’s trademarked technology).

A second breakthrough occurred the following year when the company was awarded a $250,000 Advanced Industry Accelerator Grant from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT). Those critical funds helped RxRevu sign two deals with UCHealth, the principal teaching hospital for the University of Colorado School of Medicine, one to combat antibiotic resistance in the ER, and the other to optimize patients’ heart failure medication regimens.

“Our product development and clinical validation strategies were largely shaped by these projects, making these experiences invaluable to our company and our operational identity,” said Dr. Weston Blakeslee, Head of Research and Clinical Outcomes.

Additional grants and funding partnerships have given RxRevu the opportunity to work with other renowned Colorado-based healthcare facilities, including Children’s Hospital Colorado and the Mental Health Center of Denver, to refine the platform.

Huntress said it’s a great time to be launching a new healthcare business in Colorado, a major innovation hub in digital health, where more than 130 companies work at the intersection of technology and healthcare.

“We’ve also seen a significant influx of highly educated individuals move into the area due to the lower cost of living and quality of life, which has helped us build an amazing, dedicated team at RxRevu,” said Huntress.

Categories: CBSA News