Two Iowa heavyweight investors have backed an Iowa City startup that provides virtual pharmacy services. TelePharm CEO Roby Miller told The Des Moines Register that Iowa entrepreneurship icon John Pappajohn and Iowa state Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter have invested a total of $2.5 million in the company. “When he told us about this, it just made sense,” Rastetter said of Miller. “You have someone who has developed technology to help provide a service in rural communities. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, those really successful ideas solve problems. If you can spread that over a larger area, whether rural or in cities, there is a large market there.”
There’s still a lot of work to be done to get the nation’s pharmacies, big and small, connected with each other and with patients. For rural pharmacies this connection can mean the difference between solvency and closure. One Iowa City, Iowa-based startup TelePharm, has built a secure, proprietary tech platform that connects rural pharmacies to pharmacists in centralized locations. The company, which was founded in 2012, has raised a $2.5 million funding round led by well-known medical tech venture capitalist John Pappajohn and Iowa state Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter. In the past five years, scores of rural pharmacies have closed because of record low reimbursements from insurance companies coupled with the high cost of keeping a full-time pharmacist on staff. TelePharm can lower a pharmacy’s overhead considerably by using telepharmacy technology to eliminate the need for a full-time pharmacist. The platform enables a central pharmacist located somewhere else (in a larger city, perhaps) to inspect and verify prescriptions that are being dispensed by technicians in a rural pharmacy. A privacy-compliant videoconferencing feature allows patients to get face-to-face consults with a pharmacist when needed, even from home. TelePharm also includes patient scheduling, prescription, and workflow applications and can integrate with pharmacy management systems and electronic health records systems, the company says.
