For all the promise of digital technologies, medical care today is still largely provided in the same unstructured manner as it always has been. When you need to see a doctor, there are typically 5 or 6 steps you need to take before a potential outcome: finding the doctor; finding time to schedule the appointment; visiting the doctor; getting a diagnosis and prescription; visiting a pharmacy and paying for your medication. Each one of these steps, while necessary, has to be done with live communication and often in-person visits that requires the parties involved be present at the same time. This can be not only inconvenient, but also an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time for both the patient and the provider. These processes account for a material percentage of the costs of delivering medical care.
We believe digital processes, accessible via a mobile phone, and in an asynchronous manner, will over time transform how medical care is delivered, and how much it costs.
Nurx is a service that today prescribes and delivers medication from a mobile app and in doing so is redefining the doctor-patient relationship and the practice of primary care. We are announcing today that USV had led the company’s latest round of financing.
Today, Nurx delivers birth control and Truvada for PrEP, conveniently and quickly, with the user in charge at every step, done via a simple text based mobile interface. We believe this is a radical new way of providing care – by changing unstructured interactions into structured care, by shifting work from MDs to algorithms where possible, by automatically and on the fly creating a portable, digital medical record. As a result, this dramatically lowers the cost to the user (to $15 or less) as well as potentially making the lives of medical professionals better by giving them more time for creative work with more patients, resulting in better outcomes.
Since launching earlier this year, Nurx has served thousands of users across 3 states – California, Washington and New York. It will be available in 3 more states this year and nationwide in 2017. Users love it. To supplement this growth, Nurx will be expanding their team to build new applications for messaging, apps, and other integrations that will come to define these new healthcare accessibility systems.
Beyond that, we believe this focused entry point can evolve into being the first point of contact for anything healthcare, giving the user as much control over their care as possible for as low a cost of possible. We are excited to be participating in one of the mobile medical networks for the 21st century.