[Updated 6/6/17 12:48 pm. See below.] Austin—Digital Pharmacist has raised $6.5 million in a Series B round of funding.
[More details on the company and comment from the CEO added.]The financing was led by Activate Venture Partners in New York and Austin, TX-based LiveOak Venture Partners and brings the total funds raised by the company to $13.7 million. Digital Pharmacist, which is also based in Austin, has developed an online system that allows patients to communicate with pharmacies.
One of these services is a HIPAA-compliant “refill cloud,” which uses text, social media, and Web communications.
Pharmacies manage these services through an online dashboard. And, in addition to providing drug refills and wellness classes, the system also enables pharmacies to send patients marketing alerts and updates, the company says.
Digital Pharmacist said it would use the proceeds to enhance its software and for marketing.
For example, Digital Pharmacist is working on additions that could be used in scenarios where there could be patients who are refilling medications from different physicians, CEO Chris Loughlin told me in an interview. “But no one’s giving you a heads up that you shouldn’t be taking these two drugs together,” he says. “We can detect an adverse interaction.”
One of the ways that Digital Pharmacist enters the market is through partnership with drugstore companies. Last month, Digital Pharmacist announced that it would be working with Sav-Mor Drug Store to create Sav-Mor-branded Web, e-mail, mobile, and text-messaging capabilities, according to a press release.
While many companies have sought to deploy advances in technology to the healthcare space, most of those were geared to physicians and hospitals, says Chris Loughlin, Digital Pharmacist’s CEO. Pharmacists, he adds, have been left behind even as their role has evolved to include more patient-centered activities.
“Now you can get a flu shot at the pharmacy; in California, you can get a prescription for birth control from pharmacists—you don’t need to go to a doctor,” Loughlin says. “That relationship is evolving and it’s critical for them to communicate with patients.”
Digital Pharmacist was launched four years ago as RxWiki, which offered web and mobile services to community pharmacies. The company raised its Series A funding of $7.2million in October 2015. (LiveOak also invested in that round.) Loughlin joined the company as CEO in February 2016 around the time RxWiki’s founders exited the company.
This past January, RxWiki announced it was merging with TeleManager Technologies, a Newark, NJ-based provider of cloud communications services. The two companies were rechristened Digital Pharmacist.
