Your access to life-saving medications shouldn’t depend on your zip code. Yet, for millions of Americans, especially in rural areas or lower-income communities, that is the reality.
Despite pharmaceutical spending in the US reaching over $700 billion each year, wide disparities in access to medications persist. The resulting inequities are particularly acute for rural communities and lower-income families, as well as for certain stigmatized populations such as those living with HIV or Hepatitis C (HCV).
Further, the clinics intended to serve these very groups, such as Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), Ryan White Clinics, and Sexually Transmitted Disease Clinics, often struggle to stay afloat financially. In particular, they lack the capabilities and capital needed to build and manage their own in-house pharmacies, leaving patients who use these clinics disadvantaged relative to those receiving care at larger medical groups and hospitals. Nine out of ten large hospitals now offer their patients access to an on-site specialty pharmacy. Yet, less than 20% of these safety net clinics have one. This is an unacceptable status quo.
Today, we are thrilled to announce our investment in Alchemy as they work to better connect our life sciences and healthcare delivery systems and solve these supply-demand mismatches in the pharmaceutical value chain.
Alchemy has emerged to empower the long tail of independent providers with the physical, clinical, and digital infrastructure they need to fully serve their patient communities effectively and profitably. With Alchemy’s pharmacy operating system and managed services platform, clinics are able to incorporate medication fulfillment into their core service model, which allows them to capture more of the economics, which further allows them to reinvest into their core clinical operations. Ultimately, Alchemy enables the most economically challenged healthcare providers to provide better care to the most marginalized patient groups, with medications access as the keystone.
In other industries, we have seen technology companies that empower the long tail of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) unlock massive market opportunities. Toast revolutionized the restaurant industry by giving independent businesses the digital tools they need to compete with large chains. Shopify did the same for e-commerce, turning millions of small merchants into global brands. Square transformed how small businesses handle payments, empowering them to operate as efficiently as larger enterprises. Alchemy is applying the same principles to the healthcare sector—by giving underserved clinics the infrastructure to run their own pharmacies, they are unlocking a multi-billion-dollar opportunity while simultaneously solving a critical societal challenge.
There are few stronger examples of founder-market fit than Alchemy’s founding team: Sid Viswanathan, serial entrepreneur, was cofounder, president, and eventual CEO at Truepill. He’s been through the highs and lows of startup building at scale and knows “the hard thing about hard things,” quite literally. Peter Park, who previously worked closely with Sid on a variety of pharmacy innovations, founded businesses focused on people living with HIV in Africa. He and Susie Crowe, Alchemy’s Chief Pharmacist, spent years providing quality HIV care for patients across Kenya, and facilitating the dispensing of essential medicines to patients who otherwise would not have had access to them. Collectively, they have spent 18 years in Africa building the largest HIV access program in the world, and have set up, operated, and scaled pharmacies that have dispensed over 25 million prescriptions to patients across all 50 states in the US. It’s not an exaggeration to say that bringing medications to those in need is a life calling for all three of them.
We could not be more excited to partner with this incredible team to take on the challenge of making key medications more accessible to those who need them. By giving clinics the tools to not just survive but thrive, Alchemy is laying the foundation for a more equitable healthcare system.
