RxLightning – a creator of the industry’s first comprehensive platform for streamlining specialty medication access and affordability – announced that it closed a $17.5 million Series A investment to support the company’s growth and further remove barriers to life-saving therapies. This funding round was led by LRVHealth, with participation from McKesson Ventures and existing investors Novartis (dRx Capital), Onco360 (BrightSpring Health Services), Hearst Ventures, and HealthX Ventures. This funding round brings RxLightning’s total capital raised since inception to $20.5 million.
With RxLightning, healthcare providers – ranging from those practicing at independent clinics to large health systems – utilize a streamlined workflow to complete the multi-step specialty medication onboarding process in a matter of minutes. And the company’s MedAccess Ecosystem is an integrated platform that provides transparency into the patient access and affordability journey for doctors, patients, specialty pharmacies, and drug manufacturers, reducing administrative burden and enabling onboarding support in real-time.
The specialty medication market represents over half of total drug spending in the U.S., reaching $301 billion in 2021, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And despite this growing reliance on advanced therapies, accessing these medications remains a slow, manual, and costly process. Every specialty medication currently requires a custom paper form that a provider or patient must complete. Then these forms are pushed through a manual process outside the electronic health record (EHR), which can result in significant care delays.
RxLightning is known as the single destination to enroll patients for any specialty medication – brand or generic – at any specialty pharmacy. And the company has digitized forms for over 1,200 specialty drugs with custom logic and smart-pick menus and continuously adds forms for new medications as they enter the market. Plus the modular platform automates the FDA’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) program, confirms patient eligibility and coverage, and streamlines enrollment in financial assistance programs to further eliminate access barriers. With RxLightning, providers and patients can complete the entire onboarding process in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks.
With this funding round, LRVHealth’s Josh Flum and McKesson Ventures’ Carrie Williams will join RxLightning’s board of directors alongside HealthX Ventures’ Mark Bakken, former Walgreens executive Brad Fluegel, and Julia Regan.
KEY QUOTES:
“Many people have tried to fix the slow, manual specialty medication onboarding process, but they’ve approached it with a single drug, pharmacy, or isolated part of the process in mind. RxLightning is the first to provide an end-to-end solution that covers the entire market – from every medication and destination to every stakeholder in the process. This new investment will help us further scale our medication access capabilities, support infrastructure and personnel growth, and maintain the unprecedented rate at which we’ve grown our partner base – all while receiving strategic guidance from leading industry experts.”
— Julia Regan, CEO and founder at RxLightning
“RxLightning has gone far beyond creating a digital experience that replaces paper forms, and has created a first-of-its-kind ecosystem that connects every part of the specialty medication process. As the specialty market continues to grow and transform the treatment of diseases, RxLightning will play an important role in improving access while minimizing cost and burden on the system. We’re proud to be standing alongside such a talented team on this journey.”
— Josh Flum, managing partner at LRVHealth
“RxLightning addresses the tedious administrative burden faced by providers when trying to initiate patients on specialty medications. The complexity will only increase as new drugs entering the market require even more nuanced clinical, financial, and logistical considerations to ensure patients get access to medications as efficiently as possible. It’s rare to find a company that is so truly aligned across pharma, payer, provider, and patient needs.”
— Carrie Williams, partner for McKesson Ventures
