Digital health provider creates a scalable unification platform for healthcare and life science with Azure-based technology

Three years after its inception, Rx.Health has vaulted over the obstacles that trip up so many companies with big ambitions for scalability, performance, and compliance. Its founders backed their vision with the technical capability of Microsoft Azure, mapping out a blueprint for growth that’s going global. Rx.Health created a collection of digital health solutions that make care navigation, patient monitoring, and engagement faster and more automated than ever before—and on a much greater scale. It’s realizing its goal of cost-effectively bringing more help to more people with Azure.

Confronting the challenges of twenty-first century healthcare

When he says that digital health is fragmented, Dr. Ashish Atreja, Chief Innovation Officer of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine in the Mount Sinai Health System and a board member at Rx.Health, speaks from hard-earned experience. He’s a gastroenterologist whose patients suffer from diseases and syndromes that can be difficult to treat, like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). “There are so many care gaps,” he says. “We do an excellent job of treating patients who are right in front of us. But they have lives to live, and 99.9 percent of their time is spent outside the clinic. We have no visibility into what happens to them when they’re at home, which is where they most often are when their conditions worsen.” That, he adds, is only one drawback of a reactive healthcare system. Knowledge is power, and that’s especially true for many patients who deal with common illnesses. Putting the latest health and wellness information in the hands of patients is key to helping them get well and stay well.

The way to provide that visibility into a patient’s day-to-day life without interrupting it clearly lies in the ubiquitous tool people carry everywhere—their mobile device. Atreja and many of his colleagues now routinely prescribe apps in addition to pharmaceuticals. Meditation, mindfulness, and other types of apps provide continuous access to educational information, routines, and practices that help patients optimize their health. But the proliferation of such apps brings mixed benefits—how to keep track of them all?

That’s why the team that created the original app at Mount Sinai Health System spun off as Rx.Health, a startup dedicated to carrying that work forward and creating an entire digital health unification platform. The company created a digital engine, the Rx.Health platform, to combine all the digital assets for a given patient, including access to the patient’s electronic health record (EHR). It supports that functionality with a module that can be used to engage with large patient populations simultaneously for universal health information, plus a host of related solutions.

Making quality care anywhere the expectation everywhere

For Richard Strobridge, Chief Executive Officer at Rx.Health, the answer to many healthcare delivery issues lies in scaling existing resources to care for more patients. “It’s one thing to do a good job with one patient at a time,” he says. “It’s a whole other thing to do that for millions of patients. The concept of digital medicine is the next wave, and I think it’s finally going to get us to deliver care at the scale we’ve been trying to achieve for the past twenty years.”

While skilled medical professionals can’t be everywhere, apps can. Strobridge believes that social determinants of health are ideal candidates for digital intervention. Traditional obstacles to care include lack of access to healthcare, transportation to medical appointments, nutritious food, and shelter. “A lot of this is a matter of accessing resources that can help,” says Strobridge. “Our engineers and clinicians are creating automation and monitoring magic in healthcare with our platform, and Microsoft Azure is the foundation.”

Achieving ambitious goals with cloud agility

As the Chief Solutions Architect at Rx.Health, Sarthak Kakkar confronted a classic startup technology quandary. It didn’t make economic sense to build an on-premises infrastructure and adopt a full DevOps team to support it. “We needed a solution that would match our commitment to monitor and offer help to patients continuously,” he says. “Azure complements that vision with its easy scalability and ease of management. And the help we’ve received from Microsoft has been commendable.”

For Strobridge, the cloud was an obvious solution. “Our greatest issue is access,” he says. “Mobile devices have brought ubiquitous access, and with Azure we can deliver a range of care solutions to people wherever they are.” Security and patient privacy were also top of mind in the Rx.Health development process.

The Rx.Health team sought compliance from the start. With its solutions now entering markets in Canada, India, and other countries, Rx.Health relies on the various compliance policies built into Azure, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), and others. “The Azure compliance policies give us a lot of confidence,” says Kakkar. “That confidence extends to the highly secure Azure datacenters. And I trust Azure because of my past experience with its features and capabilities.”

The Rx.Health team has been gratified by initial gains that some healthcare organizations have made using its platform. These include significant improvements in patient activation and completion rates for procedures plus reductions in readmission rates, hospital stays, and no-shows.

The Rx.Health platform scales easily. “We’ve gone from 500,000 digital prescriptions in 2019 to 2.5 million in 2020,” says Atreja. “And we were able to demonstrate that by decreasing no-shows and with better preparation for imaging and procedures through apps, a health system on average can save $1 million per service line. That means increased value from digital monitoring, aligning with both fee-for-service and at-risk models, because it creates a highly efficient process, less patient dropouts, and high patient satisfaction.”

For Kakkar, it’s about efficiencies that back up care. “The scalability we’ve achieved is possible because we built our platform on Azure API for FHIR,” he says. “We find it easy to automate processes with that technology.” For Strobridge, that means a bright future for Rx.Health. “If we didn’t have the people and the Azure solutions that we have, I’d pull back on the reins,” he says. “But our pipeline has grown five or six times in value and number of contracts in the last five months. We value the relationship and the technology we have with Microsoft.”

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