Prescriptions enter the digital age

By Quentin Casey – National Post | link to original article

Todd Murphy’s startup is still small, but its ambition is large.”Our goal is to fundamentally change the health-care system in Canada,” says the chief executive of Saint John, N.B.-based MedRunner.

Launched in 2009, the startup developed software that allows doctors to send prescriptions from their offices to local pharmacies instantly, using iPads instead of prescription pads, avoiding the hen scratch associated with traditional handwritten prescription forms. With MedRunner’s software, pharmacists need not struggle to decipher a physician’s unique scrawl. The technology can also alert doctors and pharmacists to harmful medication combinations.

“Our technology saves physicians and pharmacists time. And it provides safer health care,” Mr. Murphy says.

But providing clear and reliable prescriptions is only one of MedRunner’s innovations, he says. The real feat is in how the software is funded. MedRunner’s software is provided free to doctors. Revenue is pulled from pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies, which all benefit from the efficiency, clarity and reduction of errors that arrive with e-prescriptions.

“We’re having the private sector pay for improvements to the health care system. That’s a completely new model,” Mr. Murphy says.

With most provinces battling large deficits and escalating health care expenses, it’s an approach that could help trim costs and boost efficiency, he argues.

“We’ve created an application that can help fundamentally change how the health care system is paid for,” Mr. Murphy says.

Like many of New Brunswick’s rising startups, MedRunner was conceived at the University of New Brunswick when Mr. Murphy was an MBA student in 2008, and later he partnered with Kevin Garnett, a UNB pal and software engineer.

Together, they designed MedRunner’s e-prescription software while raising more than $800,000 in funding, including $100,000 from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and $125,000 from the First Angel Network, an Atlantic Canadian venture capital group.

MedRunner’s efforts have also been encouraged by pharmacies such as Sobeys and Lawtons Drugs. And a cadre of physicians has offered advice through the design process.

In the past 18 months, Dr. Brian Craig has helped shepherd MedRunner’s creators through the complex process of designing medical software, offering insight on patient privacy regulations and other topics.

On this day, reached at his clinic, the Saint John family physician is using his iPad to order a prescription, one of the approximately 20 to 25 drug orders he sends each day. The bulk of those orders are now sent through MedRunner’s e-prescription software. And thankfully so, he says.

“Our written prescriptions are like reading hieroglyphics.. Do mistakes happen? Yes,” he says bluntly.

Dr. Craig admits that typing prescription details into his iPad is slower than using a pen and pad. But now there is little need for pharmacists to call his office seeking clarification on prescription details.

“That makes my day more efficient. I don’t get five or six phone calls from pharmacists, which means I get to see an extra patient,” he says. “We’re getting away from the hen scratching and the deciphering that’s needed by the pharmacist, which places the patient, the pharmacist and the physician at risk. This is a more secure, accurate and safer prescription.

“So far I’ve had nothing but patient approval. We’ve been waiting for this for years.”

Up to this point, MedRunner’s technology has been available only to a select number of physicians in Saint John, part of an initial trial.

In July, MedRunner will launch province-wide, meaning 500 New Brunswick doctors should be using it by year’s end. The company will enter Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island later this year, and there are plans to pursue the Ontario market in 2012.

“It’s a sustainable model that can work in every province,” Mr. Murphy says.

At the Sobeys pharmacy in Rothesay -a town just outside Saint John -Trudi Buote was one of the first pharmacists to test MedRunner. Now she’s eagerly awaiting its full launch and is hopeful all doctors will agree to enter the digital age.

“It’s a lot more clear, a lot more concise,” she says. “You develop a knack for reading hieroglyphics over the years. But this takes that need away and allows us to focus our efforts on the patient.”

MedRunner currently has eight employees, but Mr. Murphy expects that number to double or triple as the company spreads its roots this year. He says Canadian pharmacists dispense 450 million paperbased drug prescriptions each year -a figure that is growing at 6% to 7% a year. In other words, there’s a massive market for MedRunner to pursue.

“Obviously, as a private company we want to create jobs and make money. But ultimately the challenge of changing the health care system is our goal,” he says. “We feel we’ve nailed both the application and the business model to do that.”