What if automation could help patients better follow their prescriptions? Natalie Park and Saumya Rawat met at MIT and are co-founders of Pharmesol which seeks to do this.
Highlights:
Martin Aboitiz Introduces Natalie Park and Saumya Rawat
What Problem Pharmesol is Solving
Pharmesol's Product and What it Does
Pharmesol's Business Model
Fee-For-Service vs. Value-Based Payments
What Makes Pharmesol Marketable?
"... I think ideal profile of a customer would be an integrated delivery network. What that means is that they have both a health system as well as a health plan..."
Why Not AI?
"... Pharmesol is a clinical automation company, and we're solving the problem of lack of clinical capacity and challenges with workforces at provider organizations..."
"... These people, they know what they're talking about. They're trained. Graduate degree, they're a doctor of pharmacy. Underutilized resource..."
Transcript of “Automation for Better Prescription Outcomes”
Guest: Natalie Park and Saumya Rawat
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston Podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish and Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty of its top five engineering school in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic. Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs.
He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups, which I'm involved, including a startup that came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. Today we have a very special show, a very special podcast because the main host is going to be Martin Aboitiz. Say, hi Martin.
Martin Aboitiz: Hello, everyone.
Sal Daher: The reason that I'm having Martin pitch in as the host is that this is a digital health podcast. It's about a digital startup. It's called Pharmesol and Martin will pick it up from here. Now Martin is the founder of Healthjump and I'm an investor in Healthjump and he's also my brother-in-law. He knows tons about this whole space and he connected with Natalie Park and Saumya Rawat, the founders of Pharmesol. I'll let him do the introductions here.
Martin Aboitiz Introduces Natalie Park and Saumya Rawat
Martin Aboitiz: Excellent. Here we have Natalie and Saumya, they met at MIT and MIT tied us all together. Why don't you speak about yourselves a little bit? Let you do the introduction. Natalie and Saumya.
Natalie Park: Hi everyone, my name is Natalie. I'm a pharmacist. The space we're in is medication management, which is of course something that I'm really passionate about.
Saumya Rawat: I'm Saumya, I'm a software engineer by training. I've had a wide variety of interests in entrepreneurship, tech, and healthcare. I actually met Natalie towards the end of my time at MIT where I did my undergrad. I also did my master's there. I think one of the things that really resonated with me just talking to Natalie was this overall problem of pharmacy and medication management. I'm not a pharmacist by any way or means. I have learned a lot over the time just working with her. One thing that really just stuck with me was when I was prescribed a new medication and I would go home, I would-- Anytime I started feeling a little bit off, I would look up that medication, how I was feeling in Reddit, I'd spend so many hours on Reddit, reading about other people's experiences.
It almost made me feel a little bit more scared and worried. It just felt like a terrible experience as a patient just feeling so isolated and alone when you're at home and you don't necessarily have your doctor on the phone. Am I like, who do I call? How do I get help? It just really resonated and I just really, speaking to Natalie about this, realized this is something that we can maybe solve by including technology into that world. I'll let Natalie talk a little bit more and expand a little bit more on the problem that we're working on.
What Problem Pharmesol is Solving
Martin Aboitiz: Natalie, when we were talking earlier, I learned the isolation of the pharmacist because I as a patient don't see the pharmacist. I buy drugs at a pharmacy and I know there's a pharmacist there. I'm just curious about the pharmacist's experience and how does that tie the traditional pharmacist, which we all heard about exist, but have never actually spoken with one to how you view it from the inside and how Pharmesol addresses this situation.
Natalie Park: Let me talk about the problem we're solving first and then answer your question about this. As Saumya mentioned, the problem we're solving is what I've observed and have known as a pharmacist, patient experience with medications are poor and medications are not currently optimized. When I say the experience is poor, patients don't know how to inject themselves, how to use that inhaler correctly, whether they need to take it with food. They don't know what the side effects are and what these look like.
They currently don't have a great way of getting this information in a way that they understand and is accessible and it's hard to get immediate help when they're experiencing issues. The part about medication not being optimized, you know, the patients may be suffering from side effects unnecessarily. The drug may not be at the optimal dose and it's not being efficacious right now. All of these lead to poor outcomes and many of these are often reasons for non-adherence that lead to poor outcomes such as preventable hospitalizations and ED visits. On the other side is that we need clinical resources to monitor and make treatment adjustments. We need clinicians, but the problem is that workforce is one of the most pressing challenges for provider organizations. Their clinicians already have their plates full. One of my hypotheses, going back to your question about pharmacists is that we're not leveraging pharmacists to their full extent. To optimize medication management, I think a big opportunity is leveraging pharmacists, who are specifically trained for this function, but the challenge right now is that they have limited ability to bill for services, bill for clinical services they provide because pharmacists don't have provider status on a federal level, and bill for Medicare Part B.
Sal Daher: Ah, Interesting, I didn't know that is this economy, because someone who has valuable knowledge, and there's no incentive for that person to spend her time imparting that valuable knowledge.
Natalie Park: What that means is, they can't really bring in revenue for the organization because they have a limited ability to build, and in a fee-for-service environment naturally, it's hard to justify an investment and demonstrate an ROI, but we believe that as healthcare is moving increasingly towards value-based payments, there is an opportunity and environment would support more investment in medication management, and also leveraging pharmacists, again, who are experts in medication management.
Sal Daher: Value-based reimbursement means that you are being reimbursed based on the value that you're producing, the results the patient is having instead of just being paid, saw the doctor, you're paid X.
Natalie Park: Exactly.
Martin Aboitiz: How does Pharmesol address this?
Natalie Park: Yes, again, going back to the problem, we're solving this fiction between needing clinical capacity to improve patient outcomes. We're using clinical automation to improve patient experience and medication management without adding more to clinicians' plate because we believe that we need a solution that acts not only facilitates but ultimately waits for clinicians. What Pharmesol does is we're a clinical automation company, and we provide patient education, side effect monitoring, efficacy monitoring to patients on a daily basis, and look for opportunities to optimize medication management. Saumya, do you want to talk more about the product?
Pharmesol's Product and What it Does
Saumya Rawat: Yes. Today, we do have a product that is deployed, and it's live, and we have patients going through and I can talk a little bit more about what we're really trying to aim for there. As I just mentioned, we want to create the best experience for patients that we think is going to result in improved outcomes. What we're doing today is we're sending text messages to patients about their patient education, their side effects, as well as just checking if their drugs are actually working for them, as it should be. The reason we actually specifically chose text messages is that most providers have the phone number of patients, that's how they're scheduling calls, or scheduling appointments and things like that with them, as well as it enables us to access patients in a way that they already communicate, and is always in front of them.
We don't want to disrupt lives. We don't want to interrupt their everyday life. We want to be there when they need us, and we want to be there proactively. How that really works is where there's fully automated bi-directional communication system. Everything is automated and there's two-way communication and I can walk through what that really looks like. When you go to your doctor, you're prescribed a new medication. In this case, it may be for Metformin. You go to your pharmacy, you go pick it up, and then we start texting. We will let you know initially about hey, here's your new drug. Here's why you're taking it. People really understand the importance of it and we'll let them know you know how you should take it. Do you take it once a day or twice a day? What do you do if there's a missed dose, letting them know that information ahead of time, and also giving them opportunity that if you forget, you can always just message us, "Hey, I missed a dose," and then we'll respond back with, "What do you do?"
In a couple of days, we'll ask you, "Hey, do you have diarrhea? It's a common side effect." If the patient does have it, we'll walk them through like, here's how you can manage it right now and it'll go away if you just stick through it and really showing the importance of this medication and how you can help work through those side effects. That's the toughest part, is just staying on boarded onto those medications. How do I get used to something that's new to my body? How do I adjust to this new schedule and new addition to my lifestyle? We want to provide that information and education to help support a patient without creating in a way that they already communicate, which is through text messages. It's a little bit about what we're doing today.
Martin Aboitiz: Do you also communicate on the schedule itself like did you take your drug today or suggest the time to take it and check if you actually took it or not?
Natalie Park: We don't ask every day whether you have taken it, but we do provide reminders. I think this information we're providing them, we believe, serves as a natural reminder that they should take the medication. We do help them navigate if they're having any adherence issues. We may ask, "Hey, have you missed a dose and why did you miss a dose?" Is it because you are not sure whether it's working for you? Is it because you experienced a side effect and that's why you missed the dose? We ask those questions and based on those responses we may give them tips about how they can address the challenge and also let their clinician know of, "Hey, your patient is having these adherence issues and this is the reason" This might be something you want to talk about with your patient.
Martin Aboitiz: Because medication adherence is one of the bigger problems in healthcare. One of the ones that if we could address, if we could solve that one, we would be running a much better system if we could solve just that one.
Natalie Park: Absolutely.
Martin Aboitiz: Currently you have a product and it's running and you're serving patients. I'm curious, how do you sell it? What's the business model? How do you get in front of the provider and what encourages the provider to see you there?
Pharmesol's Business Model
Saumya Rawat: Currently our business model is on a subscription fee per patient to these provider organizations. One of the biggest reasons why we chose to sell to provider organizations is because they're the ones who are really managing that patient's health. They're ultimately doing that follow up care, they're doing the dose adjustments. They're checking in with the patient. Right now, it may not be necessarily at a daily level, which is what automation can help us do, but they are doing that level of care now that we want to take off their plate, that's something that automation can do.
The other thing too about why providers is that they've built these relationships with their patients. Patients really trust their doctors and it's a good way to engage patients by working with their actual doctor and their doctor supports our program and our platform. It allows us to already have a portion of that patient buy-in that is necessary to get them to engage and to answer these questions, but then improve outcomes, improve adherence further down the road.
Martin Aboitiz: Would this be typically in value-based medicine or not only?
Natalie Park: What do you mean by that?
Martin Aboitiz: Would the provider-patient be a value-based care relationship for your customers?
Sal Daher: Martin could you unpack that a little bit for the lay audience that might not understand those terms? Just explain a little bit.
Fee-For-Service Vs. Value-Based Payments
Martin Aboitiz: Sure. Well, you as a patient depending on your plan, whether the provider is getting revenue from various value-based care programs or not?
Sal Daher: Value-based means that it's based on outcomes. If your patient gets better, the blood pressure is better controlled, and so forth, then the reimbursements to the provider, the physician or the nurse practitioner, or whatever is higher so there's an incentive?
Martin Aboitiz: Right?
Sal Daher: Okay.
Martin Aboitiz: Now the patient is probably not aware.
Sal Daher: Of how the provider is compensated?
Martin Aboitiz: How the provider is getting paid for their visit. They might just know the name of their service. Whether they're in the Medicare Advantage Program, for example. The Medicare Advantage Program has the value-based care. My question is, would the customer, the provider be under a value-based program or might it be if just a fee-for-service? Would the customer be interested in either of those situations or only in the value-based care world, which we talked about?
Natalie Park: Yes, I think what we typically find that in reality our customers are in a hybrid environment. Some of their patients or some of their revenues maybe in a fee-for-service environment and some are tied to value-based payments.
Sal Daher: Okay. Natalie, if I could just unpack this a little bit. Ok, so fee-for-service is a traditional way of medical services being paid for, basically saw doctor for this visit that you get so much money and the other type is tied to the results that come from the work that was delivered. It's not procedure driven, it is outcomes driven. It's driven by the results that you get with the patient's health.
Natalie Park: Yes, and there are, different ways that these value-based payments or contracts can be structured. Some of the most common ones are being tied to quality metrics. Those quality metrics might be blood pressure controlled, A1C controlled, adherence, or doing screenings because we know that these improve outcomes ultimately. Those are the established quality metrics and the payment is tied to meeting those goals.
Others may be the measure might be total cost of care. If you decrease total cost of care, you may get a bonus payment or shared savings of the portion that you decreased or saved the payer or the health plan or the measures of value may be hospitalization or ED visits. Again, if you decrease hospitalizations, you may get a bonus payment or sometimes you may get penalized for having readmissions.
We find that our customers are really living in both of the worlds, currently both traditional fee-for-service as well as value-based payments. Because we are able to improve outcomes and many of these quality metrics that I just mentioned, hospitalization, adherence, blood pressure, controlled because medications are one of the most critical tools, most important tools that improve health outcomes.
We impact those and customers would be very interested in achieving those outcomes. I think we bring value to our customers at different levels. In a fee-for-service environment, we still bring significant value for those customers because again, the core problem we're solving here is clinical capacity. That's regardless of what reimbursement environment you're in. If you don't have the clinical resources, you don't have the clinical resources.
Sal Daher: The medical system is overwhelmed anyway. Whether you're in a traditional fee-for-service, it means that you see a patient for this, you get paid so much. Or if you're in outcomes-based reimbursement system where results controlling A1C is a marker of blood sugar or other markers. If that's controlled, you get so much compensation. In either case, you add value to the provider, to the physician, or to the nurse practitioner who's seeing the patient. Okay, just clarification, so please continue.
Martin Aboitiz: Yes. How do you get in front of the health system in order to sell your service?
What Makes Pharmesol Marketable?
Saumya Rawat: Yes, it's been a really interesting journey, how we've landed these relationships and built these relationships. When we originally started, we were asking open-ended like questions. We were just doing primary market research to really identify is the problem that we've experienced ourselves and we've seen ourselves throughout our careers. Is this something that actually exists and resonates with everybody else? Is there a theme that we can pull out of this?
We want to ultimately build something that people want. What we did was we had over 200 conversations with healthcare executives, with people, with physicians, patients, pharmacists, people in pharma, like just across the board to really understand, what is your biggest challenge? One of the common things we heard for these healthcare individuals was this capacity issue that we've been honing in on.
There's just so much work to be done and there's not a lot of time. Everybody is very overworked and that's something that people are trying to figure out different ways that they can alleviate that burden yet still provide the same level of high-quality care to patients. I see so many open-ended questions and that theme pulled out and then we went in into, okay, let's think more specifically about medications. What do you wish was better in the medication management space?
One of the common themes that came up, again, like what we mentioned, what has been mentioned as theme is like adherence. How do you improve patient experiences? How do you improve patient satisfaction? How do you engage patients in order to provide them this information? We've really used those conversations to build those relationships. Now with our customers, we know what their biggest issues are and that's how we're selling the product. Is we're going back to them about, "Hey, you told us like these are the three things that you wish were better. Our product is helping solve those three things in this particular way."
Having continued conversations with our stakeholders appointing in additional people, appointing providers or doctors and physicians and hearing their thoughts and feedback on what we've built and using that to iterate through the product as well. What can we add that makes this better? What are drugs and diseases that would be the most impactful for your organization? It's been very driven by the users which I think we think is the best way to build a product, build it based off of what people want by listening to them and understanding why they're having those questions and really identifying the root causes behind those so we know that we can not be like a bandaid solution but really help from the actual root scenario.
Martin Aboitiz: Still to my question, so you had 200 conversations. How do you produce these conversations, because this lack of capacity you see in the system, you also have it in a lack of capacity for trying anything new or for doing something different. The machine just keeps on rolling.
Natalie Park: Primarily we've been doing cold outreaches and we've been very surprised by the amount of people who were willing to speak with us. I think that highlights the challenges in healthcare and how much they want to share their thoughts and what they think is the problem because unless they talk about their problems, talk about their thoughts, talk about their ideas of how this might improve. I think that's the way the right solutions can be created.
I think they recognize that and I think that's why many people who have graciously shared their time, because you're right Martin. Exactly. They don't have the time and they were willing to get on a 30-minute call with us, and that's why they were willing to talk to us.
Martin Aboitiz: We all recognize the problem as patients and clearly it's a problem that's recognized by providers also, but there's so many other problems that are also recognized but are not being addressed. I'm really glad to see that this one is getting worked on.
Saumya Rawat: I think to add on to that as well, these are problems they've recognized and they've talked about. These organizations, sometimes they're just strapped internally for resources to create their own solution. They're looking to go support strong teams of other individuals. I think for us, since we are small and early, there's been a lot of support and mentorship throughout that process to-- The other thing too is it's a slow process to build something in-house for these health systems. They're looking for new novel ways and that may be able to go through more rapid iteration, may be able to be more customizable, more quickly.
Looking outside and supporting entrepreneurs and others to help build those solutions to help support their teams because they said they just don't have the resources to really do it in-house, so they're having to look externally for different tools and solutions to help create that level of impact for their teams.
Sal Daher: Saumya, I have a question, or Natalie, the players involved here are the providers, meaning doctors, nurses, and so forth. Payers, insurance companies, but there's also the pharmaceutical companies. They have a stake in compliance, meaning that people take their medicine because if people take their medicine it's likely that they're going to refill the prescription and they're going to use more of the medicines that the pharmaceutical companies are in the business of selling. Have you approached the pharmaceutical end of things?
Have you worked with them because they're a very interested stakeholder in this compliance? That's a word that sounds terrible. That's the technical term compliance with the prescription, but people taking their medications according to prescription. Have you explored that direction?
Natalie Park: Yes. We've certainly considered partnerships and as Saumya mentioned, when we were first doing primary market research to just learn about what is the market need. We also spoke to stakeholders at pharmaceutical companies as well. As Saumya alluded to previously, we consciously made the decision to partner with providers as in doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists first because we believe that has the most impact on patient experience, and actually changing the treatment.
Sal Daher: Ah, okay.
Natalie Park: In terms of business model, perhaps there is more opportunity with health plans and pharmaceutical companies and I think there are absolutely ways we can partner with them and we want to in the future, but I think that will come naturally once we can engage the patient and truly improve patient experience first, which is I think, why working with provider organizations is critical and that's our current approach.
Martin Aboitiz: Your typical customer, would it be a large integrated health system or would it be a provider group?
"... I think ideal profile of a customer would be an integrated delivery network. What that means is that they have both a health system as well as a health plan..."
Natalie Park: I think ideal profile of a customer would be an integrated delivery network. What that means is that they have both a health system as well as a health plan. The reason is, I already explained, why we want to partner with clinicians because we think that's important. However, health plans, I think, derive the most financial value, because, at the end of the day, they're responsible for paying for these hospitalizations, which cost $20,000 per hospitalization. That's a huge value for them if an intervention prevents a hospitalization or ED visit. If an organization has both of these sides, I think it makes sense operationally, as well as financially. I would say that's the most ideal type of customer. I think all the digital health companies probably would agree with me.
To be honest, I think we're still finding what's the typical type of customers for us. That's why we're still speaking with a lot of different organizations to really find that product market fit.
Saumya Rawat: The importance of starting small. Starting with our first pilots, and going from there really refining the product and understanding how can we engage those patients? How can we create ideal workflows for providers? At the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to decrease the friction so really identifying and solving and creating the best product and gradually going bigger and bigger, and just getting water through the pipes. Those places also have a lot of sale cycles and things like that are a lot easier to approach and really understanding how we can build the best product possible while continuing to engage with the larger stakeholders and continuing to manage those relationships, and growing in that direction.
Natalie Park: Without categorizing the types of provider organizations, I think any provider organization that really wants to provide high-quality medication management to their patients, and want to improve their patient experience and address the workforce challenges, I think would be a great customer for us. Also willing to adopt an innovative technology solution. I think those would be the type of partnerships, the organizations we would want to partner with.
Martin Aboitiz: I see. Let's talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts here. You mentioned when we spoke earlier that you're not using AI per se. Let's talk about how you're building this out and why AI is not your preferred solution here. It seems like a typical AI problem here.
Why Not AI?
Saumya Rawat: Yes, exactly. I think one of the biggest things that we want to do. We're building a logic-based system. We know exactly what are the possibilities that can be sent to a patient and that's very important. When we're providing clinical information, it's important to know what is being sent to patients, so that we can protect ourselves from any sort of risks, and really know all the possible scenarios that can occur. How we're building this then is we have clinical pharmacists who are actually building this content for us. When we ask them, "If you could talk to a patient every day, what do you wish you could tell them and what do you wish you could hear back from them?"
It was really interesting because when we asked our pharmacists to do this, they told us that this wasn't how they normally think. That's because right now what they're doing is they're providing care every few months or every month to patients. It's a different framework of thinking for them but at the end of the day, that's how we can provide that tangible value to a patient and be very proactive as well.
We want to be proactive, not reactive. We want to anticipate things that can pop up so that as a patient you feel comfortable and you feel knowledgeable and you know what to do if it happens. Similarly, we're then able to help clinicians and doctors provide that high quality tangible, daily care in a way that's scalable because again, we're using automation. With this logic processes, everything is automated and additionally, we built our system in a way that allows us to scale and support more drugs quickly. There's so many drugs out there and we acknowledge that. We know that that can sometimes be a challenge, but the way we're building this, we feel comfortable and confident that we're able to tackle that large amount of drugs and feel very comfortable with what we're sending to patients, because we know exactly what we're sending. I think additionally on the AI component, it may come in down the line.
I think it's just natural language processing, so patient responses. How can we best understand what a patient is telling us? How can we also send things to patients when it's most relevant to them? If somebody's responding at 5:00 PM every day, well that tells us that maybe we should start sending the messages at 5:00 PM because that seems like when they're on their phone the most. A lot of small, smart, tangible things we can do to increase patient engagement without creating the risk of what clinical stuff are we sending to a patient, because we generate all of that in-house and we know exactly what is generated in terms of that clinical content.
Martin Aboitiz: I see. Yes, it's interesting. With this new, now there's easy, the issue of the chatbots via the artificial intelligence chatbots, that's the hot topic of the day right now, but I could see how it's not the solution to this particular problem.
Saumya Rawat: Yes. With chatbots, as a patient, you need to know what to ask them. I think that's an issue. As a patient, I have no idea what to ask. What we're trying to do is really take a proactive approach where we're giving patients knowledge on like what are things that can occur, and letting them know that-- we're telling them originally, at the very beginning, what happens if you miss a dose, but we're also letting them know that down the line, if you ever miss a dose again, just ask us and we'll repeat that information back to you.
It's really empowering a patient to feel comfortable with their health, because if you don't even know what to ask, what are you going to ask a chatbot? No idea what to ask. How can you get the answers if you don't know the right questions?
Martin Aboitiz: For our listeners here, what would be a call to action who might be listening to this program, and what would you like them to do when they're done?
Natalie Park: Well, we're always looking for partners who are also passionate about this problem. If you are, we want to hear from you. You can reach out to us at founders@pharmesol.com. Pharmesol stands for Pharmacy E Solutions. It's a pharm plus e plus sol. We would love to hear from you.
Sal Daher: Excellent. Maybe what could be useful is a restatement of what Pharmesol is attempting to do and the problem it's solving. I think that's valuable so that people remember and then they might say, "Oh, let me connect pharmesol with somebody that could be useful to them."
"... Pharmesol is a clinical automation company, and we're solving the problem of lack of clinical capacity and challenges with workforces at provider organizations..."
Natalie Park: Pharmesol is a clinical automation company, and we're solving the problem of lack of clinical capacity and challenges with workforces at provider organizations. These lead to poor patient experience and outcomes. We're starting with medication management first because this is a critical component to improving patient outcomes, yet it's currently underoptimized, so there is a huge opportunity there. That's why we're starting with medication management.
Sal Daher: The team is Natalie Park, who comes from a pharmacy background and understands the problem really well, and Saumya Rawat, who is a computer science software person, studied at MIT and they met at MIT and they have a very interesting partnership. By the way, ladies, I must say before we started this recording, we had some technical problems, and I really like the way that you two collaborated, and the way that you are very patient helping each other to achieve a common goal. That to me, speaks of a team that really works well together, has a future together.
Natalie Park: Thank you so much and thank you for bearing with me primarily with my technical difficulties.
Sal Daher: No, but you see, that's the whole point. A startup doesn't have the luxury of having IT teams on board and so forth. Saumya, of course, the MIT software person, she immediately jumped in and she knew how to do this, but Saumya doesn't know the problems of the pharmacy world because she doesn't have that experience. I thought it was a very beautiful collaboration, the two of you solving that problem.
By the way, I'm not writing checks right now, but frequently I write checks after I interview people because I see how they interact in a podcast and how they perform. Sometimes even if they'll send me a full resolution, portraits afterwards, I ask them for full-resolution portraits. [laughs] They send me these tiny 85k images. I said full resolution because otherwise it pixelates, it looks terrible and so this is a little bit of due diligence. It's not for me at the moment. I'm not writing checks because I'm trying to raise the fund. I can say that I was very impressed at how you worked as a team. Martin has been working with them, and maybe he's seen more of this, but I was impressed.
Martin Aboitiz: The other thing that caught my eye is, which I didn't know, I'm relatively new in the healthcare world. Healthjump is an eight-year-old company, and before that, I was-
Natalie Park: It sounds like a long time.
Martin Aboitiz: Yes, but I'm relatively new. I'm learning things all the time. The one thing that I learned is that a pharmacist is a doctor, has an undergraduate degree and a graduate degree, and a doctor's degree on pharmacy. I always understood the pharmacist role to be more like a technical degree. It surprises me how a pharmacy who needs to have a pharmacist physically on the spot has a doctor's training person in the spot. This is a person that I've never spoken with-
"... These people, they know what they're talking about. They're trained. Graduate degree, they're a doctor of pharmacy. Underutilized resource..."
Sal Daher: Underutilized.
Martin Aboitiz: -or that if I have spoken with, I've asked them about some over-the-counter medicine.
Sal Daher: Exactly. You got these brainy types behind the counter, and they're just ringing up stuff like a cashier, but they know tons and tons and so I make a point of asking. Because I go to a CVS, and you can talk to the pharmacists and interactions. These people, they know what they're talking about. They're trained. Graduate degree, they're a doctor of pharmacy. Underutilized resource.
I like the fact that you ladies are using a little bit of software, a little bit of market knowledge to utilize this underutilized resource in a system that is lacking resources, that are lacking human resources. Very promising.
Natalie Park: Actually, I would love to highlight this point again, because this is actually why at first I wanted to go to pharmacy school and be a pharmacist. I actually came to the States as an international student, and when I first came, I'm not even sure if I really had insurance. [laughs] Pharmacists are most accessible health care professionals because, as Martin mentioned, you could go to the CVS, Walgreens for your community pharmacies and ask them questions. That's actually exactly what I did.
I had a rash, and I've never had this allergic rash type of experience before, and I was scared. I went to the pharmacy, and then I asked, what should I do? They helped me. I think there's a huge opportunity to leverage pharmacists not only at health systems hospitals but also community pharmacists. They're the medication management experts, and there is a huge opportunity there. We hope to unlock some of that through the work we're doing.
Sal Daher: Growing up as a boy half a century ago in Brazil, one of my favorite aunts is married to a pharmacist. She trained as a pharmacist, and her husband owned several pharmacies. He was actually not a graduate. She was a graduate pharmacist, he was not. He was a practicing pharmacist in Brazil in those days was allowed. He read a lot and he was an autodidact, self-taught. You mentioned the rash and so forth. People would come to him and they would ask him for recommendations and he said, "Yes, that could be this, it could be that. It could be a fungal infection and so forth. Try this. If it doesn't work, maybe you could just go see the doctor."
There's a lot of intelligence behind the counter that I think is underutilized. I think it's very promising. Esol has very promising addressing of what promises to be a very fruitful work. Tremendous.
Martin Aboitiz: On a tangent.
Sal Daher: On a tangent.
Martin Aboitiz: Our cousin Fernando, who Sal also knows, gives me a tip on where you're running through Europe or through the world, you need to find a place to eat. He says the best place to ask is in the pharmacy. Because you walk into a pharmacy and there will always be a pharmacist and the pharmacist will always be well educated and there will always be an economically well off that can pay for a decent restaurant. They will know where you can eat, and they have no vested interest on what restaurant you go to.
Sal Daher: Unlikely the pharmacist brother is running the Shawarma place down the street. You might be able to tell by the last name, proprietor is also-- that is a great idea. Instead of asking a cab driver, ask a pharmacist. Tip for travelers, ask a pharmacist. By the way-
Natalie Park: Good tip. New strength of pharmacists.
Sal Daher: Pharmacist power. Yes. Unless there are any other thoughts here, we can wrap up this conversation with Natalie Park, CEO and Co-Founder, and Saumya Rawat, Co-Founder and CTO. Is that correct?
Saumya Rawat: No. I'm technically on a CPO role for product and we have a third co-founder who's our CTO.
Sal Daher: CPO, Chief Product Officer is Saumya Rawat. This person, as brainy as she is, she was the one who solved the technical problems we had, she's the product person. Now, they have somebody even brainier, who's the CTO.
Saumya Rawat: Exactly. His name is Batman, a wonderful, amazing engineer.
Sal Daher: Oh, a pseudonym. A pseudonym. All right, so Batman. He goes by the name Batman because he's not on board yet and he wants to remain anonymous.
Martin Aboitiz: No, Sal. He is on board and his name is Batman.
Sal Daher: Batman?
Martin Aboitiz: Yes. You can find him on LinkedIn.
Sal Daher: Does he talk like this?
[laughter]
Saumya Rawat: His ringtone is like the Batman sound.
Sal Daher: Well what's his full name?
Saumya Rawat: Batman Feldman.
Sal Daher: Oh, Batman Feldman. Now I get it. This is awesome. This is incredible. Very impressive team. A third person, that means it's even less likely that it's a folley. A single founder could be a folley, two founders less likely, a third founder chances are this thing is cooking with gas. Awesome. Thanks a lot. This is a conversation with two co-founders of Pharmesol, Natalie Park and Saumya Rawat. They are solving a problem of lack of capacity in providing knowledge for the use of pharmaceuticals in our system and trying to bring in the brains of the pharmacist to the fore.
Thank you very much, ladies. Thank you very much Martin Aboitiz, Founder of Healthjump, in which I'm an investor. I hope you're all well in the new year. This is Angel Invest Boston, I'm Sal Daher. Thanks for listening.
[music]
Sal Daher: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.