In the past, a pharmacy dispensed medicine and medical services provided medical advice. Advances in technology has shifted the ground and this has led to consolidation and streamlining. This includes telemedicine, or the practice of medicine using technology to deliver care at a distance.
To gain a clearer insight into these new trends in healthcare, Digital Journal touched base with Suren Ajjarapu, Founder, Chairman and CEO of TRxADE Health.
Digital Journal: Can you provide a brief background on TRxADE Health?
Suren Ajjarapu: TRxADE Health is a health services IT company. The company began by optimizing the pharmaceutical supply chain and bringing time and money savings. There are roughly 21,000 addressable independent and small chain pharmacies, which indicates that there was already a significant market need for better services that needed to be addressed. TRxADE was created to meet these needs and grew quickly, now accounting for roughly half of this market as registered users.
With this captured audience TRxADE is now in a position to further bring health services programs directly to its pharmacies and end consumers. Bonum Health, which is powered by TRxADE, provides the telemedicine and concierge prescription delivery to its end users while the core TRxADE platform continues to bring the lowest priced products available to pharmacies across the nation.
DJ: Why do you think it’s important to digitize the retail pharmacy experience?
Ajjarapu: Consumerism has finally caught up to the healthcare industry. Patient interactions with pharmacies outnumber all other health provider interactions and, as such, are in need of modernization.
Traditional interactions require physical involvement of patients, whether it is waiting in pharmacy lines to drop off or pick up prescriptions, coordinating their own care by monitoring their prescription refills, accessing health-related information, and even scheduling time to talk to their busy pharmacist should they have questions. This retail pharmacy experience is overdue for change and requires the digitalization of the various aspects of pharmacy services to be bridged under a single pharmacy experience.
DJ: How is TRxADE Health helping to reduce the rising cost of prescription medications?
Ajjarapu: TRxADE’s unique marketplace structure has created a critical mass of pharmaceutical buyers. And this has generated the ability of our company to effectively source product from multiple vendors, reduce administrative tasks for customers to create and monitor vendor accounts under a compliant mechanism, optimize data to further reduce shipping and warehouse costs, and put an independent pharmacy in the best position to address rising costs not only at the product level, but in final delivery to buyers.
DJ: What is the pandemic’s impact on health services IT?
Ajjarapu: It has substantially accelerated the deployment and adoption of health services across the board. These innovations are creating a new generation of more engaged and responsible healthcare consumers, which further leads to the optimization or differentiation of healthcare services via IT.
DJ: What are the benefits of vaccine passports? How can companies reduce controversy around them?
Ajjarapu: Vaccine passports bring standardization to the validation and reporting processes inherent with disease management.
The controversy is primary housed around politics and the spread of misinformation combined with the relatively new nature of the pandemic and limited credible scientific content.
Companies are stuck between deeply polarized consumers. We have seen that any action, other than offering general and neutral statements and implementing what are often weak operational policies, can hurt their customer base profoundly.
This risk assessment is mortifying to businesses and without actionable real-world data, any meaningful action on their part – no matter how noble – would be seen as questionable at best by their stakeholders.
A way for companies to reduce controversy is to share the real-world outcomes with their stakeholders from sources that are impartial and rigorous about their fact-checking.
DJ: What trends are you seeing in health services IT?
Ajjarapu: Trends are revolving around consumerism and their appetite for individualized data. Patients are getting more engaged and responsible in their own care and with that, they are increasingly using mobile platforms for healthcare services .
