systematically gone through the academic journals and responded to each of those reasons. Over a period of time we are establishing credibility not just for ourselves, but for the underlying data that we use.”
Even if the drug makers would rather ignore or undermine such data, Overstreet says it’s valuable to the organizations responsible for buying drugs: namely, managed care groups, which have to decide every year which medicines to buy in bulk from pharmaceutical manufacturers.
To help these organizations, AdverseEvents has created the RxScore, which Overstreet compares to the FICO score used to evaluate consumer credit-worthiness. “It’s a 1 to 100 score for every drug, based on the millions of reports we have. It enables us to line up all these drugs and say, ‘This drug is more safe or less safe.’”
In some cases, a manufacturer might choose to stock a more expensive drug because it’s associated with fewer complications and hospital readmissions down the line, saving money overall. A related service called RxSignal can help care organizations detect problems with drug safety even before the FDA has issued a safety alert.
Such information may be increasingly useful in the era of accountable care, as hospitals and insurers have growing financial incentives to keep patients healthy. Under new rules imposed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, hospitals that fail to keep readmission rates under a certain level stand to forfeit part of their Medicare reimbursement payments.
“A critical part of our whole value proposition is the fact that under the ACA and the shift toward improving patient outcomes, our data helps to avert serious side effects,” Overstreet says. “This is not like, you take a drug and you get a cough. This is like, you take a drug and it puts you back in the hospital for a week with kidney failure. The insurer not only has to pay for those readmissions, but has to pay a penalty to the government for letting that happen. So there is a lot of money at stake here.”
Insurers and managed care organizations are “a very receptive audience,” and subscriptions to AdverseEvents’ “Explorer” product, which includes RxScore, RxSignal, and the basic drug safety data, are now “off and running,” Overstreet says.
He thinks the big pharmaceutical companies will eventually have to come back to AdverseEvents on bended knee. “They are not going to have a choice,” he says. “They are going to have to engage with our data and at least understand what we are doing and how it impacts their ability to sell their drugs.” That’s big talk aimed at a powerful group of companies—but Overstreet has proven his ability to fight the powers that be.
But was the pause in business development at AdverseEvents to reverse the Franchise Tax Board’s plan worth it, in the end? “I think so,” Overstreet says. “Obviously, I had a personal stake. But I’m proud that we accomplished that. I’m not sure I’d want to go through it again, but it was a good once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
