ZappRx

About ZappRx

ZappRx was a digital health company established in 2012 by Zoe Barry, a former executive at athenahealth. The inspiration to create the company stemmed from a personal experience involving a family member's difficulty in accessing crucial specialty medication. Barry, who had a background on Wall Street before transitioning to healthcare, identified significant inefficiencies in the prescribing and prior authorization process for these high-cost drugs.

The company developed a cloud-based platform designed to streamline the complex workflow required to order specialty medications. This digital solution served as a secure, collaborative online hub for patients, physicians, and pharmacists. Its primary function was to consolidate the multi-step, manual process of gathering necessary information, such as pharmacy details, payer requirements, prior authorizations, and relevant clinical history, into a single, efficient procedure. By digitizing these interactions, the platform significantly reduced the reliance on faxes and phone calls, cutting the time for order completion from a standard of nearly 20 minutes to under three minutes.

ZappRx's business model focused on licensing its technology to biopharmaceutical companies and also considered selling aggregated, anonymized prescription data. The platform was utilized in various therapeutic areas, including pulmonology, cardiology, and gastroenterology, and the company secured partnerships with major biopharma clients like Bayer, Genentech, and Teva Pharmaceutical. The company attracted significant venture capital, raising over $42 million from investors such as Google Ventures, Atlas Venture, and SR One, the venture arm of GlaxoSmithKline. In June 2019, ZappRx was acquired by Allscripts to enhance its Veradigm e-prescribing business and expand its portfolio in the payer and life sciences sector.