Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I want to probe that a bit before we go beyond 2010 to the new mode. Let me just get the benchmarks on the 2005 to 2010 when you started focusing on patient reminders. What did that do to your business in terms of growth? Where were you in 2010 for instance?

Frank Sheppard: We continued to grow. After 2005, we climbed to being in the $11 million to $13 million range.

Sramana Mitra: So in 2010, we’re talking about a $12 million dollar company. What was the product strategy? When you were talking about trying to change patient behavior, what drives change in patient behavior? What have you learned about the market?

Frank Sheppard: At its simplest form, it all comes down to education—helping patients understand the importance of their medication, understanding which medication will do what for them, how to mitigate side effects etc. There’s just no end of opportunities to helping patients and involving that pharmacy to interact with the patient, to understand those challenges and help remove those challenges.

At the end of the day, it gets to trans-theoretical change behavior model. Patients are naïve as to the what, why, and where, so we have to educate them. The pharmacy is not their primary care physician in any form or fashion but the pharmacy has this tremendous advantage that they’re talking to the patient every month. They can engage the patients in ways that no one else in the healthcare ecosystem can do to change that patient’s behavior over time and also to understand why that patient is not compliant. Is it the side effects? Are they in denial? Do they not understand which medications are which? Can they not afford the medication? Those are all things that pharmacies are qualified to address, but unless they’re engaging the patients at a detailed level, they won’t be able to address.

Sramana Mitra: How do you impact that scenario? How do you help the pharmacies engage with the patients?

Frank Sheppard: It’s really around two core areas. One is to look at and help them analyze, determine, and prove their data such as where and which patients need help at what time. Effectively, we have evolved to taking the big data approach to an individual pharmacy and then using that understand where good opportunities to engage patients exist. We’re trying to help them do it in a bite-sized manner where each day, we give them some targets and opportunities that they may be able to do to impact a small number of patients. Over a period of time, handling a small number of patients every day creates a tremendous movement into the patient’s healthcare outcomes and, ultimately, even into the whole healthcare ecosystem.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard
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