PipelineRx is a San Francisco-based medication management services and platform company focused on clinical telepharmacy. Led by CEO Brian Roberts, the company provides technology-enabled telepharmacy solutions to acute and specialty hospitals. Its offering combines an integrated, private, cloud-based technology platform, an optimized distributed telepharmacist network and a team of hospital-trained, licensed clinical telepharmacists. PipelineRx currently services over 200 hospitals. The company raised $9.1M in funding and will use the investment to strengthen its technology offerings. PipelineRX develops telepharmacy services that let pharmacists remotely verify and fill hospital prescriptions, addressing pharmacist shortages in rural areas. The company routes pharmacists in locations such as San Francisco to provide coverage for distant hospitals, an approach inspired by teleradiology. It is aiming to carve a niche in rural healthcare to reduce medication errors and staff burnout where on-site pharmacy coverage is limited. PipelineRX plans to build an analytics platform to capture geographic prescription patterns, interventions, safety measures, and dosage data. Financially, the company was founded in 2010 and is based in San Francisco; the California Healthcare Foundation—an initial investor in 2012—has provided another (undisclosed) investment, and last year PipelineRX raised $5 million from AMN Healthcare Services. Pipeline RX provides telepharmacy services and a configurable SaaS telepharmacy platform that lets remote pharmacists monitor and verify inpatient prescriptions over a HIPAA-compliant network. The company combines a staffing/outsourcing model with telemedicine technology to cover labor shortages, reduce onsite headcount, and offer variable-cost staffing to hospitals. Pipeline RX targets rural and public hospitals initially and has expanded interest from larger health systems; it is beginning to offer a customizable SaaS approach for bigger systems. The company says its average medication turnaround time is seven minutes versus an industry standard of 20 minutes and reports labor-cost savings ranging from 30–70% depending on the hospital. Pipeline RX currently has about 150 employees (roughly 120 telepharmacists), operates in 27 states, has had its pharmacists used by more than 200 hospitals, and more than 30 hospitals have adopted its SaaS product. Leadership plans include building an analytics platform to capture prescribing and intervention data as a third phase of the business.

Total raised

$14M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jul 2015