OptimizeRx Corporation (OPRX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Yes. I'll be frank with you, 3.5 years specifically, I didn't see anything that kind of really blew my mind, honestly, right? And I felt like a lot of the things that were done were much more on marketing side. And to give some example -- like an example without naming the company or the actual product. But there was -- I'm going to put on my digital hat on. There was a potential for a market launch or relaunch for another indication with a digital companion. And the feedback from sometimes if we go to the market with that, want to show that the actual molecule is not working as well. So there's still some challenges and questions around how does that help versus kind of knowing what it is. So I probably jumped to the one that didn't work more. And again, I wasn't kind of focused specifically on the launches of drugs, but I just -- I haven't seen anything that blew my mind. I think the other 2 experts probably much better at it because you're in that space directly.

And we really have to frame that conversation that sometimes the way you're doing business is hindering our ability to see the possible light sitting on the minds, new problems as sort of perception versus trying something for fear of changing that perception. So I think that makes a lot of sense. And Chris, what are you thinking in this area? What about...

We're going to talk a little bit later about one particular successful program, but another one that comes to mind that's a spot on for the subject matter is an early experience program that we've actually done with one of our clients which was specifically designed to solve some of these problems. So they launched their drug pre DTC. Really wanted to give doctors an opportunity to have patient experience and sort of shorten the feedback loop for patients on therapy so that they could very quickly, they were a later entrant into the category. So they wanted to bring some validity to what they were doing. And so we basically distributed coated starter kits with a free trial offer at the beginning of them. And so the doctor has given 3 of these with the design of having them get 3 patients on therapy very quickly. And then patients who take surveys during the program, playing back how things were going, and we would send those reports back to the HCP. And so we had very successful uptake in that program. And when it was over, the HCPs who participated in that program had written 6 more scripts on average than those who had not. So this was sort of a way to try to bridge that gap, get doctors early experience and also embedded in it. It was a very solid patient engagement program to sort of help patients move through their treatment journey.

And I see the same program. I'm wondering if it's in the same category, it was with pediatric?

No, this was actually in the diabetes space.

Okay. So what was interesting about that was this is in pediatric and it was about experiencing higher doses of a particular drug that parents tend to give medication vacations or really trying to keep as impact of that. It was working as well. And so they use the same procedure where the parents were able to get free drug. All they had to do was call the 800 number and answer -- press the button 1 to 5 of your trial doing X. And it was -- it had tremendous results. So that was a good program that had worked well. But it's not inexpensive. But the benefit long term is financially is also very good. I've seen beautifully designed programs that could not come off the ground. And part of it is because too little attention or assumptions are made about how they're going to bring gain to those patients. And that's -- and it's very important also and the thing I love about patient programs is that if you do it right, if you realize that each indication, every age group, the gender, all of that plays into it and you have to design to it. So what really gets in theory to how cookie cutter they can be because their competitor is sending a nurse to someone's home because the other 5 brands are doing it. Is it necessarily the best way to do it? So that can affect the design. But we have worked in programs where there was like all technology. We had -- this is going back a couple of years. When we had a drug that was for osteoporosis, it was one tablet a month. And so the big difficulty there was remembering. Well, they didn't -- so we think people signed up. And by the time the third or fourth year, we had tens of thousands of people who were active in the program. And we knew they were active because they would go online or call an 800 number and they would say, "You know what, don't remind me the first Wednesday of every month, let's make it Sunday." And every year, 25% of the population that were using it modified it. So we knew they were very active in it. And if testing had been popular then, it would have been the perfect solution. And I think...

That is the perfect time because, I know I told you these 20 minutes, we're going to go by very fast. We're actually on time and I want you guys to be able to get through a little bit of time for questions coming in from the audience. So we're going to turn it over actually to talk about this quick case study. And then I also want Eugene to take a minute because he's doing something really exciting in this space after his 3 years of pharma. So we're going to share our screen real quickly so to study some of these programs that we're talking about here, so let me see. All right. Chris, why don't you dive into this because this is a collaborative case study that we did on behalf of women with breast cancer. Chris, can you start the series for us and talk about this?

Sure. So this was -- this is actually one of our oldest clients, believe it or not, but they had actually approached us when they first launched an adjuvant breast cancer therapy drug. And essentially, the program was meant to be taken for a year. And unfortunately, this particular medication had some pretty significant side effects, grade 3 and grade 4 diarrhea, which was expected for most patients. So the challenge here, again, and this is a classic example, was on adherence. It was how do I communicate with patients to help prepare them for the challenge of getting through this side effect, which would get better over time, but is so daunting at the beginning that without any preparation and education, you almost have no chance to get through it. And then also to help let the patients know that the company was there with additional resources, free medication strategies and other things to help patients get through that early onset condition. And so at first, they had come to us simply to set up a patient engagement program, which we have done. But then later on, and I think I was saying this to you guys before the meeting, one of the things I love about working in this space is you get a bunch of smart people in a room that present a challenge. And sooner or later, people will sort of figure out a way to overcome it. And so they basically came to us and said, "Well, this is working okay, but how can we sort of take it to the next level?" And that's when we got Mary Anne involved and started to work on what comes next year.

And I want to share with you guys, and this is -- I was a nurse for years, a nurse practitioner. And I think what was always frustrating to me as a provider is new drugs would come out and side effects to be explained. And [ Peter ] will have the handout and he said, "Hey, you will have nausea, vomiting and diarrhea." What would happen is patients would call back in and they start having nausea, vomiting and diarrhea and any time you have these symptoms, it appears to patients that they're actually getting worse. They're not getting better in those situations, right? It doesn't matter that you hand it in a piece of paper or you explain the side effects that's really actually is something that's completely debilitating to a patient who is dealing with the life-altering disease. And the truth is for far too long, I think we in life sciences has always just seen it as being a side effect and not recognizing the importance and the extreme concern that this could have. And the difference for side effects versus adverse effects which I know were a big issue in Boston Pharma. The reality is that adverse effects do really well in terms of moderating and be able to manage the new relationships with providers that go beyond just handing a prescription out saying, somebody can call and engage with that patient. The patient begins with side effect versus adverse effects nausea, vomiting and diarrhea are not just side effects to patients and this period of illness and worsening conditions is very real. And providers, when you're dealing with a new drug launch, they have a real strong sense if they can bring them into a patient support program and understanding the difference of side effects versus adverse effects and make sure that both the provider who prescribed that is feeling good about it as well as providing support and education to that patients and family member and more importantly, managing those critical moments. I think that's why this further went forward and why Mary Anne built what they built out is so unique. So Mary Anne, can you dive into the solutions that you created in this?

Sure. So first of all, the indication was cancer. And this drug was designed to prevent the reoccurrence of cancer, which is a big deal. But if you look at just every drug and every commercial and they talk about side effects, which ones don't say diarrhea and which ones don't say nausea. So when it actually occurs and it's more dramatic, people just want to know they want to have someone they can talk to they can trust. And they want to hear is expected, describe it to me, I'll be able to tell you if it's serious or it's not. And so we decided to put -- we have on our staff, we have certified oncology nurses. And so the patient knew that who they were talking to. They were talking to an expert who could -- and talking about diarrhea, frankly, for a lot of people may not be an easy thing to do, particularly when you have to describe it. So -- but we did it through texting and that made it easier because you didn't have to verbalize it. You could just write about it. And to have someone say, it's expected, what you're describing is normal. And then to take it to next step and say, what are the benefits of this drug. So if you're weighing out having diarrhea for a period of time, not in a lifetime experience. And if the trade-off is potentially elongating your life, it's a no-brainer. People get it, but they need the right information, and they need it from a trusted source. And so the solution of a combined text-based opt-in program with a certified text session with nurses led to these results.

So just a couple of things about that. So just so people know the way this ran because this sort of goes to something Eugene talked about earlier. So many of our pharma clients don't want to leave 2-way texting turned on because for fear of what's going to come back in the other direction. And so this client has that feature set up on our SMS platform. And so patients normally cannot text back anything other than what's expected in the script. And so the concept here, which was so interesting was we basically set up blocks of time where the nurses would be available. And so -- and we had to do this in pockets because we have a lot of patients in the program and didn't know what kind of response we would get. And essentially, what we did is we would announce for a couple of days, hey, on Monday, there's going to be a nurse available to answer your questions. These are the hours, blah, blah, blah. And we were absolutely blown away by the engagement. In a couple of sessions, we have 40% of the patients who were involved -- who are invited actually asked the nurse a question, and this was across the spectrum of how long they were on medication from people who were only on it for a week or 2. So a couple of patients who had been on it for 6 months, and we were like still have questions at 6 months. Well this is through SMS, as Mary Anne talked about, folks, I guess, felt a little bit more comfortable sort of having a faceless dialogue about this condition as opposed to having to pick up the phone and call a nurse or call a doctor. And so it was very interesting to sort of be involved and see the kind of questions that came up. So overall, for the whole program, 34% of patients engaged with the nurses when they were available. And this isn't just with this program, but with others. When you do this right, patients love it. So 85% found the program helpful in helping patients start their medicine, and 90% would recommend it to folks who were suffering from the same condition. So we were just ecstatic over how this went.

And I wish we had more time to dive into this. First, some questions so you can engage with them, and then always you can talk to Mary Anne and Chris, if you'd like to discuss more about this program and how it works for them. And next, I want to turn it over to Eugene because Eugene, 3 years in his time at Bayer has led him to do some exciting things going forward. And Eugene, tell us a little bit about what you're working on today and insights that you're gaining.

So 3.5, but who's counting? So on one side, I joined my lovely amazing wife in YourCoach.Health, which has started as a practice management solution. Marina, my wife, actually went through breast cancer herself and that's what inspired her to become a health coach. And we sort of morphed into a marketplace between health companies and coaches. And then the other component, and that's the URL, I am actually writing a book with a going title of Hard Pill to Swallow, an Entrepreneurs Journey Through the Belly of the Beast. And enjoying every moment of that, my first time writing the book. And if you check out that link, I'm actually doing a little differently. Every Friday, I do a little bit of a teaser from the chapter, and I welcome kind of the audience to join in and give me the feedback thoughts, people I should talk to as part of that. So that's probably way under 2 minutes. So it's perfect. Gives you some time for more questions.

I love it. Mark is going to join us back and we're going to be taking questions from the audience. So Mark?

Thank you. That was great. I have a question here, building on the case study we just went through. Physician's feedback, and I'll kind of add on that question, I guess, as well as I've worked on some programs in the hemophilia space, and you may get really engaged consumers doing the diary, the tracking. But part of the challenge is how you get that data back to the physician in not only a seamless way in terms of workflow, but in terms of a way that they can use to make clinical decisions. What kind of physician feedback did you get? Any insights from that program that may be applied to future?

Well, interestingly enough, the -- some of the physician feedback came from patients. I mean the first feedback that we started to get on this program was actually through the product manager who said that several of their HCPs had patients sort of come back and say, "Hey, this is great that we had access to a nurse practitioner, we could talk to someone about this condition. I didn't need to go talk to my doctor about it." So it actually came the other way. Always a difficult thing to do to take some of the data from this and then parse it into something that turns into marketing materials. That's one of the challenges we actually face with our clients is that a lot of times, there are anecdotes that are shared. And so most of what sort of got fed back here was sort of some of the anecdotal positive feedback that we had gotten from patients who had participated in the process.

Okay. Good. So we had another one here, and this really touches on some of the bigger macro changes and trying to figure out where technology fits. Is this the idea of whether it's a telehealth or telemedicine, but idea of using electronics to communicate patient position, there's pre and post visit. So pre visit is relevant for chronic ongoing conditions. Post visit really does apply to everything. And you did talk a little bit about this, Chris, you said about think about content, maybe it's unbranded, lightly branded that you may be integrating in. Where are some of the opportunities that you see today and in the near-term opportunity? We assume that telehealth and telemedicine electronic communication is only going one direction. Where is pharma starting to slide into this pre and post visit from a content, from a services perspective that you see? And I know we touched on this, but just kind of looking saying, is it unbranded, moving into lightly branded then moving into patient support programs and path programs, et cetera? Where do you see some of those pre- and post-visit opportunities?

I think one of the things that we're seeing right now is, yes, unbranded. We certainly do some of that. But what we're also starting to do is in our particular case, using text messaging as a call to action during the DTC phase. So even when during the acquisition phase or we're just letting patients become aware of the drug and having them learn about it, starting to try to have a one-to-one dialogue with them via the text messaging platform during that phase. And then as they move into post prescription, we can then also invite them into joining those programs. So that's one of the things that we've seen. I don't know if some of the other panelists have some thoughts.

Yes. No, we're working with 3 different pharma companies all of whom have drugs in sort of more of a lifestyle space. And what they've done, each a little bit differently. But what they've done is you sort of have to go through the patient program, to get to the physician who's going to potentially write the script. And when you do that, you're gathering the data about the patient, what their thoughts are, why they're doing it. So you collect a live good data and then you redirect them to the physician portal. So it's genius in that you've won in both ways everything.

So we had another one here. And if we think pharmacy and certainly in the U.S. market, you've seen the retail pharmacy and specialty pharmacy players as well, really make significant investments in their customer communication programs, whether it's text messaging or within an in-app type notifications. Where does pharmacy fit into these platforms? If you see, you've got the patient, you've got the physician, and we talk a lot about that direct connection. Well, pharmacy certainly plays into this on the fulfillment side. Is it a frenemy? Is it an outreach opportunity? Where does this go going forward in terms of the Walgreens and the CVSs of the world?

Yes. It's interesting. Go ahead, Eugene.

I'll be very quick. I've always looked at PBM and pharmacy as frenemies. And let's face it. I mean Walgreens wants to own that experience with the end customer.

Yes. Absolutely. Yes. I would say the same thing. I think that we do a lot of work in specialty. So we actually have some relationships with specialty pharmacies where we're actually helping them sort of manage the patient engagement. It's just stuff as simple as refill reminders to working right through a partnered sort of program like the one that we talked about with Mary Anne, where their staff is available directly to patients to help deal with some of these issues through the platform. We've actually done some programs side by side with retail pharmacy, but there's no question they want to own the patient relationship here without a doubt.

And I think with automation, so we also handle reimbursement programs and so with automated benefit verification, you can literally have a patient come forward in things covered. And through texting, through technology, going directly to the insurer. And then when it's all figured out in terms of reimbursement, very quickly going over to a specialty pharmacy to arrange for delivery. So what used to take days can happen in the course of minutes?

Good. Well, those are the key questions, and we're right on the time that I think we have promised folks to for this kind of very concise, a lot of information in a short amount of time. And I'll turn it to you, Rebecca, for some parting thoughts on the session, if you wanted to offer those before we wrap it up.

Actually, Mark, thanks so much for everybody being here. You guys hit on some really challenging issues and we went on to a really great level of conversation and we couldn't have it without you. So if anybody wants to follow-up with them, please follow-up with everybody via LinkedIn or send us messages directly. I think Mark can actually forward them on. And the truth is as we look forward to future conversations, I'm sure you'll be seeing Eugene, Mary Anne and Chris on a stage nearby as soon as they could be reached for an in person. And if not, we look forward to seeing you guys in person hopefully in the next few months. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

You have a great day. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.