Electronic Health Reporter

PipelineRx is a telepharmacy company offering remote and SaaS pharmacy services to rural hospitals, as well as larger integrated delivery networks (IDNs). For smaller hospitals, PipelineRx offers 24/7 staffing during nights and weekends, verifying medication orders remotely to promote patient safety. The SaaS technology platform allows larger IDNs to essentially create their own telepharmacy, using one of their own pharmacists to staff additional locations.

CEO Brian Roberts has spent most of his career focused on healthcare services and staffing. Prior to co-founding PipelineRx, he was the president of Canopy Healthcare until it was acquired in late 2008. Canopy Healthcare was the leading allied healthcare staffing firm on the West Coast. Prior to Canopy Healthcare, Roberts was the EVP of business development at CHG Healthcare Services, a $600 million leader in diversified healthcare staffing which supplied physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and allied healthcare professionals to hospitals nationwide.

Here, Roberts discusses his firm and its capabilities, technology developments he’s seeing, telemedicine challenges and trends we’ll see in the coming year.

Tell me more about yourself and what inspired you to found PipelineRx?

I spent the first half of my career as a venture capitalist investing in early stage healthcare services and healthcare IT companies. I spent the second half of my career building companies from the ground up as an entrepreneur. I love the operations and technologies that are critical for building a sustainable business model. After building two successful medical staffing companies, I figured out that we could “staff” hospitals using remote pharmacists that work from home. The labor arbitrage of enabling one pharmacist to work on multiple hospitals drove on average a three to one return for hospitals. This all was enabled by creating a technology that allowed interchange between PipelineRX and hospital pharmacy information systems and EHRs.

We now have an amazing management team bringing more than 100 years of experience in building pharmacy technology companies.

Tell me more about your desire to lead a telepharmacy company? Who uses this service? How is it growing and how has it changed?

Leading PipelineRx is exhilarating each and every day. Overcoming challenges are what makes it interesting and trying to apply cloud based technology to a service that must be completed (pharmacy verification services).

Hospitals of all sizes use the service. From the small side, critical access hospitals with 25 beds use the service for long stretches, say 6 p.m. to – 6 a.m. and 24 hours on the weekends. Our service allows them to save significant costs yet have world class medical coverage of their hospital. We can also fill in if an employee pharmacist calls in sick or if there is a big snow storm and the employee pharmacist can’t make it to work. We also work with larger hospitals and hospital systems that are looking to optimize their staffing levels. While pharmacies traditionally were staffed like a firehouse with ample coverage, PipelineRx allows the hospital to staff to the median levels and then use our staff for peak or overflow. It’s been an amazing journey to see hospital administrators and C-suite’s understand that we assist in moving traditional fixed costs to variable costs through our unique service.

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