Photon, a startup modernizing prescription infrastructure, has raised $16 million in Series A funding to expand its business.
The round was led by Healthier Capital with participation from Notation, Flare Capital, and Evidenced. This will be used to expand our engineering and commercial teams and integrate our healthcare systems and platforms.
Foton’s claim is that the electronic prescribing system is broken. Lack of visibility into price and convenience results in unnecessary transfers, unanswered calls, and abandoned fills.
“As patients, the pharmacy experience feels very outdated compared to other experiences in our lives,” Photon founder and CEO Otto Sipe told Fierce Healthcare in a progressive interview. “You don’t know the price until you actually go to the pharmacy…and the problem is you can’t really compare.”
This makes everyone unhappy, Sipe argues, from patients who have to transfer prescriptions due to inventory or price issues to pharmacists and health care providers who have to help patients take advantage of benefits or facilitate prescription transfers.
Since 2021, Photon has reimagined the prescription experience as a complete end-to-end platform. It integrates with the EHR and texts patients a link to digitally access their prescriptions. Photon Marketplace allows patients to see nearby pharmacies, hours, prices, and inventory to make informed decisions. Now, patients mostly prefer mail-order pharmacies on Photon.
Photon platform screenshot
Not only does Photon claim to reduce administrative tasks, Sipe said, but patients are more likely to pick up their prescriptions at the pharmacy if they receive them via Photon. This adherence is also good for the health outcomes that healthcare providers value.
Dozens of retail and home delivery pharmacy partners work with Photon. Even if a pharmacy is not a partner, Photon can use agent AI to collect information on the platform. According to Sipe, the benefit for health system partners is that in-house pharmacy teams have real-time visibility into filling activities. Photon’s platform also supports prior authorization and clinical decision support. Sipe said Photon has sent prescriptions to half of U.S. pharmacies in the past 30 days.
Artificial intelligence helps Photon process complex and fragmented data, benefit structures and formularies across pharmacy networks in real-time. However, in Sipe’s view, fundamental data challenges need to be solved before AI can be deployed and automated.
“There are a lot of AI products out there that are bullshit,” Sipe said. “I think this will stop the recording.”
In the medical field, interoperability and transparency are still unsolved. Without it, AI would still need to ask for human input, such as benefits information. “AI is running up against the technical problems of previous generations in medicine,” Sipe said, comparing it to trying to add a supercharger to a car when its foundation is rusting.
Sipe said Photon also has pharmacy partners, but is primarily focused on creating value for clinicians. Photon’s largest customers are large providers, including several health systems to be announced soon. Other people are also interested, such as pharmacy benefit managers and payers. For Sipe, this makes sense, given that transparency regulations require an improved consumer experience. Sipe says there are even use cases for pharmaceutical companies that need more advanced insight into prescribing.
Photon’s announced partners so far include Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, Amazon Pharmacy, and athenamarketplace. According to a blog post on Photon’s website, another partner, virtual provider Blueberry Pediatrics, found that patients could get their prescriptions filled five times faster and save money on customer support when using Photon.
Photon, which primarily competes with Surescripts, serves millions of patients and has raised $32 million to date. Sipe said the company hopes to expand into specialty pharmacies in the future.
