Anurati Mathur, Founder and CEO of Sempre Health (PRNewsfoto/Sempre Health)
Over five years ago, when Anurati Mathur went to a pharmacy to pick up prescription drops for an eye allergy, she returned home without buying it. The medicine cost $150, which Mathur thought was ridiculously expensive. The pharmacy kept calling her with reminders. “I didn’t buy it, not because I forgot. It was because it was unaffordable,” recalls Mathur. This isn’t a unique story—patients often skip taking the medicine they need because of high costs, adds the 32-year old entrepreneur.
Born in India, Mathur moved to the U.S. at the age of five. Her education in microbiology and business followed by a decade long experience in healthcare startups both sensitized her to the problem of high costs of medicines and got her enthusiastic about heath tech. It was this combination that led her to found her company, Sempre Health, in 2015.
The San Francisco-based company offers discounts on copays for medicines for diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and respiratory conditions. On Tuesday, Sempre announced a $15 million Series B funding today taking the total to $26.5 million. The round was led by Blue Venture Fund, a venture capital firm backed by 35 Blue Cross and Blue Shield entities.
Not everyone is eligible for Sempre’s discounts - the company only allows them for patients who are diligent about refilling their prescriptions. Health insurance payers get to decide which medicines that want to provide discounts on. “It puts the payer in the driver's seat on how to deploy those dollars,” Mathur says. Sempre works with health insurance companies to identify candidate patients, who it then invites to try the service.
Before each refill, Sempre sends out reminders and discounts to patients on the service. A typical text message might say, ‘If you pick up your medicines this week you will pay $10, if you wait till next week this could go back up to $20.’ A patient could save around 45% of their total out-of-pocket cost on medicines annually, Mathur adds. The discounts help incentivize drug adherence, she says. “With behavioral economics based incentives combined with text message engagement, we've been able to see 15% on average improvement in adherence.”
The cost of poor drug adherence is high, both for patients and the healthcare system. Studies have shown that nonadherence leads to increased complications and hospitalizations for patients. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests medication nonadherence costs the United States an estimated $100 billion to $290 billion annually.
Sempre’s business model factors in all key players in healthcare. It initially acquires money from pharmaceuticals. It uses those funds to pay the discounted amounts to the health insurance companies. Mathur says it is a win-win situation for everyone. “If a patient skips medicines, pharmaceuticals are losing money both from the patient and the insurance companies.”
Investors at Blue Venture Fund who led the funding say it was this inclusion of all the key players that attracted the firm to invest. “The consumer wins because they're encouraged to take their medicine at the appropriate frequency at a lower cost. The health plan wins because it's servicing its members,” says Matthew Downs, managing director, Blue Venture Fund. Sempre, he adds, helps consumers spend dollars more wisely.
Kim Foerster, director of pharmacy account management at Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan, an insurance provider which uses Sempre’s Health’s services, says that there is no one solution to improve adherence. “Sempre’s services are by invitation only. So it felt really nice for us to be able to offer that to our customers and incentivize drug adherence in a new way,” she adds.
With the new capital, Mathur says she wants her company to get more patients enrolled for the service and expand the collection of drugs under their plan. “When people go to the pharmacy it is often a kind of a surprise on what you will see as the price of the medicines. There is not really a need for it to be that way,” Mathur adds.
