Date: Mar 06, 2017 Source: bizjournals (
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Revon Systems Inc. has reached an agreement with a Cincinnati-area pharmacy benefits management company, which will help the Louisville startup bring its health care technology platform to the market.
Revon will work with Appro-RX of Waynesville, Ohio, to use the technology it has been developing this year to provide a new kind of pharmacy benefit that uses technology to monitor medication patterns.
Revon is a digital health platform that helps patients track their chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) signs and symptoms, learn more about their condition and better communicate with health care professionals. The platform also allows health care professionals to easily view patients' health data reported through the app or website.
Under the agreement, Appro-RX clients -- mostly employers -- will offer the Revon platform to their employees.
The agreement offers employers who use Appro-RX pharmacy services four main benefits, according to a news release:
The Revon COPD mobile app (for Android and iPhone) with the Smart Symptom Tracker;
The Breathe COPD Resource Kit with Bluetooth-connected pulse oximeter;
The Amazon Alexa Echo COPD skill, which helps patients triage their day-to-day symptoms;
Smart Formulary Services that combine medication adherence with Revon application use.
Revon CEO Ted Smith said in an interview that the agreement between the two companies will allow both to have access to the others' data, creating a better relationship between employers, patients and the health care professionals involved in treating them.
He said he thinks that the two companies are the first to use technology to collect data to improve patient care in this manner. This surprises him because companies spend so much on prescription medications. Most employers pay these expenses without expecting better alignment between health care expenditures and outcomes, he said.
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"This is the first of its kind, that I'm aware of, where we can get together to team up with insights and feedback to help people stay well," he said. "Now (pharmacists) can go through and use that data. They can make a plan or benefit that actually works better for the customer."
He said one example of how it will work would be if a patient regularly reports the same symptoms in the Revon system and a pharmacist recognizes that a change in medication could help solve the problem. Because pharmacists don't normally have access to that type of information, such subtle opportunities normally would go unnoticed. The idea is that when these opportunities arise, a pharmacist can contact the patient or the patient's doctor and make suggestions to change the medicines.
"It's a change to the approach to the market," Smith said. "The tech piece is to bring two very different kinds of data streams in the health care industry together.
"We could find patterns. We can share that data back and forth, we can improve the level of health benefit that person has."
This agreement is a milestone for Revon, which launched in 2013. Smith calls the breakthrough a "go-to-market strategy," meaning the partnership will help bring the digital platform to the health care market.
"Sometimes it's just about bringing things together in a smart way," he said. "It has been a whole lot of fun for us to discover this."
