Health Tech
Reinforcing medication
William Febbo, CEO, OptimizeRx
Reinforcing medication adherence with affordability
Even if hospitals and physicians do everything right, treatments falter when patients don’t take the prescribed medications. Inability to afford medications is the major reason for non-adherence. Many patients don’t take advantage of prescription discounts just because they don’t know about them.
“Billions of dollars in coupons and vouchers from pharmaceutical manufacturers go unused because physicians and patients simply lack knowledge of and access to these offerings.” says William J. Febbo, the CEO of OptimizeRx.
This is where OptimizeRx® comes in. OptimizeRx’s platform integrates into EHRs and automatically provides prescription copay information at the point-of-prescribe, thus allowing providers and patients access to available discounts when it matters most.
The OptimizeRx platform extends beyond the point-of-care. Its patient engagement module further improves the likelihood of treatment plan follow-through. Despite a complex healthcare ecosystem, the platform enhances connections between pharma, providers, patients, and payers.
The Journey
Febbo founded with his physician brother a pharmaceutical-based market research company where he learned a lot about bringing together industry and medical professionals. He sold the company in 2006, bought it back in 2009 and sold it again in 2015. This exposed him to public markets, raising capital and the health technology solutions with medical and pharma stakeholders. The diverse exposure helped him learn to manage growth as well as expectations – ultimately leading to his role at OptimizeRx, an early stage public company.
Febbo was not an OptimizeRx founder, but the company has witnessed incredible growth since he joined. Three years ago, OptimizeRx was a software company with 10 employees and three interns. Since then, valuation has gone from a low of $27M to $230M, from no analyst coverage to 4 analysts, and from OTC to Nasdaq. Febbo’s passion to connect the pharma industry with medical professionals drove the team to transform an existing software company into a health-tech enterprise that improves care, adherence, and affordability, which now impacts tens of millions of patients.
I’ve learned as a leader, you cannot control timing, so it’s all about surrounding yourself with the right people. It’s not about me being the smartest person in the room -it’s about working with others who know the industry inside and out.
Do Big Things
Despite rapid changes in the digital health landscape, the industry continues to lag behind and costs continue to rise. Healthcare providers are expected to offer better care while experiencing a shift to electronic systems – often spending 5-6 hours a day within the EHR. The vision to incorporate the financial and formulary information providers may need within their EHR seemed impossible. Despite regulations and innovations in the last decade, disparate systems continue to lack significant connectivity. OptimizeRx’s platform and underlying network of EHRs continues to grow and evolve to find more ways to engage patients and providers across the care continuum without expanding the efforts of the physician.
According to Febbo, to solve a significant problem like this you have to be open to experimenting and willing to risk some efficacy. Innovation and risk are the two sides of the same coin. You have to focus on your end goal without being distracted by naysayers and take criticism positively. “Do not yield to those in the industry who say, “It can’t happen.” Use it to push you and keep going full speed”, he suggests.
Rethinking Failure
“It is OK to look at “microfails” and perhaps consider what each misstep can teach us about the next risk we’re willing to take. That said, if you fail to fail, you can’t succeed. So, it’s also OK to aim high!”, advises Febbo.
We couldn’t agree more because revolutionary changes don’t happen overnight. A willingness to experiment and the wisdom to learn from mistakes are keys to success. After all, what got you here won’t ever get you there.
Advice for the Booming Entrepreneurs
Febbo encourages budding entrepreneurs to take risks. He also advises them to focus on making an actual impact rather than just focusing on the numbers.
“I’d remind those early on in their careers to always see the bottom line—not necessarily the bottom-line from a numbers-perspective, but on doing work that will actually have an impact.”
Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEOs Of 2020
Health Tech
Viruses: Biological versus Computer
By Mark Webb-Johnson, Chief Technology Officer of Network Box
During this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, those of us working with computer viruses continue to be amazed at the similarities between the techniques used by the medical community to fight SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease) and the processes involved in our electronic anti-virus systems. Let’s look at some of these similarities, and see how computer anti-virus researchers help protect.
By Mark Webb-Johnson, Chief Technology Officer of Network Box
What is the Virus?
SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus. Essentially, a strand of information wrapped up in a protective shell and a mechanism to infect cells – information, envelope, infection mechanism.
By comparison, a computer virus consists of the payload, a carrier, and an exploit mechanism. For example, the payload would be the malicious code, the carrier an email message, and the exploit mechanism something to take advantage of a vulnerability in a particular mail client. Another example would be script downloaded from a web page, taking advantage of a web browser exploit.
Replication
The virus’s primary purpose is to replicate – to make copies of itself. SARS-CoV-2 does this by infecting cells (in the lungs, stomach, and other areas of the human body), then using the cell’s own mechanisms to make copies of its RNA and make new virus particles.
Computer viruses have the same primary purpose of replication. They want to infect as many hosts as possible. Once in a computer system, they make multiple copies of themselves and transmit out to new hosts. It is this self-replication capability that defines this as a virus.
Identification and Testing
The gold standard for identifying viruses is the whole genome sequence. This maps the full sequence of the chemical components of the RNA (made up adenine, uracil, guanine, and cytosine; abbreviated as A, U, G, and C), and results in a very long string of these four letters. That is excellent for precise identification, but not so good for testing. Due to mutations, what we know of as SARS-CoV-2 is actually a collection of hundreds of different strains of the same fundamental virus, each with their own slightly different sequences (more on this later).
To test for the virus, researchers instead concentrate on relatively small portions of the full sequence. This way, they can extract samples from a potentially infected human, amplify the RNA in the sample to obtain enough to test with, and then compare that against the portion of the full sequence. That is the RT-PCR test.
Computer virus researchers work similarly. The payload of the virus itself is a sequence of computer code that can be expressed in binary, or more commonly in hexadecimal notation. Computer viruses are often intentionally self-encrypted and randomized (we call these polymorphic viruses) to avoid whole sequence detection. Nowadays, these are by far the most common form of computer virus seen.
Researchers extract portions of the sequence that don’t change and use pattern matching techniques to detect those partial sequences in suspicious samples. We call these ‘signatures,’ and they can be effectively used to detect known viruses in suspicious samples.
Immune Response and Vaccination
The human immune system has a component known as the ‘adaptive’ immune system. The system works by identifying portions of viruses already in the body, and creating antigen-specific cells designed to identify, remember, and attack that specific antigen. These cells protect against future infections of the same virus and can survive in the body for some time (months, or years, typically). This is why after you’ve had the measles once, for example, you usually don’t get it again. Vaccinations work by purposely injecting the body with antigens that will generate such an adaptive immune response, to protect you from future specific infections.
Computer anti-virus systems store databases of signatures of known viruses. When your computer receives a new file, it can scan it, look for a match against those signatures, and take action if a match is found (quarantine, etc.). Such signature-based systems are the computer equivalent to the body’s adaptive immune system.
Innate Immune Response
Another component in the human immune system is known as ‘innate.’ This system can detect what is not ‘you’ (what is ‘foreign’) and attack the invader. It relies on the antigen’s chemical properties and doesn’t need to have previously seen that specific antigen.
For computer anti-virus, this is extremely hard to achieve well. The capability to detect and block previously unknown viruses is what differentiates good anti-virus systems from the poor. Various techniques are used, but mostly revolve around a) decoding the virus code to the rawest form, b) detecting suspicious encoding or exploit behavior, and c) using emulation or sandboxing techniques to see what the virus does when executed. Looking at behavior, rather than code sequences.
Mutations and the Future
RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 are very poor at accurate replication, and sometimes the copies made are not perfect. Base pairs get flipped. Portions of the sequence are lost. Parts of other viruses are incorporated. Before long, you are dealing with bad copies of bad copies of a bad copy. It is like the story of a million monkeys with a million typewriters, eventually producing the works of William Shakespeare. Sometimes these viral mutations are beneficial to the virus, but most often not. Whatever the outcome, these mutations are the way the virus adapts to further its goal of replication.
Thankfully, we do not see the same with computer viruses. A computer virus can and does make perfect copies of itself, 100% of the time. Sure, we have self-encrypting polymorphic computer viruses, and randomizing fragments are often introduced, but the core code of the virus is not changed, and certainly not randomly. Perhaps in time, we will see this, but with today’s non-forgiving computer CPU architectures, it is unlikely to be a successful approach.
Of course, given enough monkeys and enough typewriters, anything is possible. Perhaps they can even improve on Shakespeare. Before that day comes, however, make sure you are prepared. Subscribe to a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) that can adapt, and protect you from cyber threats.
