McKesson Ventures has participated in a $17.5 million Series A round for RxLightning, a platform for streamlining access and affordability for specialty medications. This brings the total the company has raised since its inception to $20.5 million.
With RxLightning, healthcare providers—from those practicing at independent clinics to large health systems—leverage a streamlined workflow to complete the multi-step specialty medication onboarding process in a matter of minutes. The company’s MedAccess Ecosystem is an integrated platform that provides transparency into the patient access and affordability journey for doctors, patients, specialty pharmacies, and drug manufacturers, reducing administrative burden and enabling onboarding support in real time.
“Many people have tried to fix the slow, manual specialty medication onboarding process, but they’ve approached it with a single drug, pharmacy, or isolated part of the process in mind. RxLightning is the first to provide an end-to-end solution that covers the entire market—from every medication and destination to every stakeholder in the process,” said RxLightning CEO and Founder Julia Regan. “This new investment will help us further scale our medication access capabilities, support infrastructure, and personnel growth, and maintain the unprecedented rate at which we’ve grown our partner base—all while receiving strategic guidance from leading industry experts.”
The specialty medication market represents more than half of the total drug spending in the U.S., reaching $301 billion in 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Despite this growth, the process of accessing these medications is still a slow, manual, and costly process. Currently, every special medication requires a custom paper form that a provider or patient mut complete. These forms are then processed manually, outside the electronic health record, which can result in serious care delays.
RxLightning is solving that problem by becoming the single destination to enroll patients for any specialty medication, brand or generic, at any specialty pharmacy. The company has digitized forms for more than 1,200 specialty drugs with custom logic and smart-pick menus, and continuously adds new forms for new medications as they enter the market. The platform also automates the FDA’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) program, confirms patient eligibility and coverage, and streamlines enrollment in financial assistance programs. Through the RxLightning platform, providers and patients can complete the entire onboarding process in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks.
“RxLightning addresses the tedious administrative burden faced by providers when trying to initiate patients on specialty medications,” said McKesson Ventures Partner Carrie Williams. “The complexity will only increase as new drugs entering the market require even more nuanced clinical, financial, and logistical considerations to ensure patients get access to medications as efficiently as possible. It’s rare to find a company that is so truly aligned across pharma, payer, provider, and patient needs.”
Read the original press release here.
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