Virtual care companies like Maven and Ginger are going all in on prescription drug deliveries, and it could be the future of telemedicine

• Fertility startup Maven announced Friday it was offering to deliver fertility drugs to its members in a new partnership with pharmacies Alto and SMP.
• On Wednesday, mental health startup Ginger also announced psychiatric prescription delivery in partnership with another pharmacy startup, Capsule.
• The moves highlight a key area of growth for virtual care startups that saw booming growth during the coronavirus pandemic.
• Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.

The next stage of the telemedicine boom is coming for your medicine cabinet.

Some startups that have benefited from the mass move to virtual care amid the coronavirus pandemic have set their sights on prescription delivery.

On Friday, fertility benefits startup Maven, which offers virtual fertility and maternal care through employers, announced it was expanding its services to include same-day or next-day delivery of fertility medications for its members. The service, called MavenRx, will operate in partnership with challenger pharmacy startup Alto and fertility-focused pharmacy SMP.

It works like this: a Maven member has access to the service through their employer, and meets with a fertility coach and clinician to develop a course of therapy that works best for them. If they need a prescription drug, such as injectable hormones, they can call one of the two partner pharmacies, say they’re a Maven member, and the pharmacy will ship directly to their home that day or the next day.

Once it arrives, the member has access to an on-demand pharmacist through Maven or either pharmacy to walk through the details of administering the medications. Maven negotiates a lower price for its members, which can vary based on their other health insurance benefits, Maven cofounder and chief commercial officer Sonia Millsom told Insider. 

The patient never has to enter a clinic, pharmacy, or office during the process, an appealing proposition during the coronavirus pandemic.

Digital health companies like Maven have capitalized on the digital health boom, but adding services like prescription delivery will be key to keeping members logged in once clinics begin opening back up. By offering a prescription delivered to patients’ homes on either a one-off or renewable basis, digital health startups can help lower the costs of the medication while also gaining insights based on prescription data.

Telehealth’s last-mile problem

Prescription fulfillment and delivery is akin to ecommerce’s last-mile problem, where online retailers need to get over a costly and logistically complex hurdle of getting the order to the customer’s home. In a world of virtual doctors’ visits and text-based consultations, medication delivery is the last-mile of care delivery.

“When people understand the convenience and the ability to have more access to more resources, and the ease of facilitating those resources in a comprehensive way, I think that’s here to stay,” Millsom said.

Like the last-mile delivery problem, digital health startups like Maven have to rely on third-parties to get over the goal line. Millsom said Maven spoke with seven separate pharmacy companies that facilitate home deliveries prior to selecting Alto and SMP for their geographic distribution and technological capabilities, Millsom said.

The value also lies in the data

The same was true for Ginger, a mental health startup that also announced a prescription delivery offering on Wednesday in partnership with challenger pharmacy Capsule.

While the service is still geographically limited to a handful of metropolitan areas in which Capsule already operates, Ginger chief operating officer and cofounder Karan Singh explained that it’s a rare business situation in which all parties benefit.

Singh said the primary goal is to increase access to medications for people experiencing mental health conditions like anxiety or depression. But companies like Ginger also benefit by getting access to pharmacy data that they otherwise wouldn’t get, like confirming whether a patient picked up a prescription at their local pharmacy or if they’ve experienced side effects. 

“That data is shared between the parties delivering care, and then you can manage things that can go wrong with different medications,” Singh told Insider. “We haven’t had access to that data before.”

Prescription deliveries can help cut costs

That data is incredibly valuable and can help Ginger develop recommendations for patients down the road based on what they’ve learned from previous patients’ reactions or whether or not the medication worked.

It’s the first step of helping patients get better access to higher-quality care, Singh said, which can better serve patients lacking access to traditional methods of care.

It can also help during price negotiations. Millsom said that fertility drugs are often one of the most costly parts of fertility treatment, but are also the most essential. Fertility medications can cost thousands of dollars, even with insurance. She said the prices for members that Maven negotiates with the pharmacies and insurance companies are roughly 60% less than a traditional retail pharmacy like CVS or Walgreens. 

But Singh cautioned that some virtual care companies may be motivated to prescribe more than they need to based on this model if their revenues are tied to the number of prescriptions they serve. Ginger is using a flat-fee model that doesn’t change based on how many of its psychiatrists write prescriptions.

“Our ability to scale and use data to get people better faster results in fewer prescriptions, not more,” Singh said. 

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