Case Study: PatchRx CEO Andrew Aertker Warns Of Making Too Many Changes
There’s a fine line between making changes for a better process or technology and making too many changes.
Introduction:
PatchRx combines a universal smart pill bottle device with software to boost medication adherence and streamline real-time data back to providers. Starting in January, PatchRx's smart technology became reimbursable by CMS under new billing codes at an average of $186 per month for every patient they provide their services to. They've raised an additional round of capital, bringing in strategic venture partners and healthcare providers to accelerate our growth and expansion in various provider settings across the US.
Background: (Read For Necessary Context!)
Startup Spotlight #89: PatchRx - PatchRx improves patient health through smart technology.
Case Study: PatchRx Found Their Path To Product-Market Fit Was Paved With Good Customer Questions
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned since your last fundraising round or critical milestone?
As for the most important thing you’ve learned since our last fundraising round: There’s a fine line between making changes for a better process or technology and making too many changes. There is always so much more to learn and consistently new information in the market — whether it be around the complications in healthcare operations, customer feedback on product success, or internal PDE flows. Determining when and what to adjust is crucial, though. If you adjust and change every time there is a new idea or piece of feedback, you’ll end up with product and team spaghettification. Continuing to learn and keeping eyes and ears peeled for new information is huge, but making the tough decisions around which to include and which to dismiss is just as, if not more, important.
What core changes did you make in the business processes or technology underlying PatchRx? Why were these changes necessary?
COVID-19 created its own set of problems and forced people to take different outlooks on markets and technology. We were early enough and had such great funding partners that allowed us the flexibility to be malleable with our business strategy. Where the pandemic hit us was with our supply chain – we couldn’t even get our PatchCaps in hand for over a year, so we shifted to a software-first platform for an adjusted market. And then, right as things stabilized with our supply chain, new legislation was passed to allow us to get reimbursed by CMS for our devices, which inevitably forced an updated strategy that aligns us with every stakeholder in this market. So, for us, it comes down to two things when analyzing our process and strategy: what’s the market ready for, and what can we do today.
How did you prioritize what information to pay attention to as you further developed your fundamental processes or technology?
Information is only as good as what you can do with it. And that can go a lot of directions. But consuming too much information can spaghettified an entire strategy. There’s a methodology of information employment in David Allen’s Getting Things Done that’s wonderful if you have a chance to check it out. The basis of it just comes back to having a system to get stuff done, whether that’s doing it, delegating it, putting it in a box for a someday/maybe category, etc. And with so many moving pieces and constant media, it’s essential to stay focused, and it’s something we’re still very much working on.
What were the tradeoffs that you had to consider when making the changes?
Making decisions is much simpler and easier when you have a clear strategy or vision to align yourself with. One of our strategic advisors, Dan Schneider, has enforced that very point: make decisions based on the direct effects on your one goal, with ours being around generating reimbursements for providers and transparency for patients. So we attempt, in every decision, to consistently make calls based on those same axioms, determining if it has the right outcome for our direct vision.
How did you avoid product and team “spaghettification” when ingesting different kinds of information that would influence the direction of your product development?
Gosh, it’s one of the hardest things to do because everyone on our team has so many good ideas for direction, features, or strategies. But I think it goes back to my previous comment, once you set a strategy and determine how and why it works, product and team decisions become much simpler, i.e., does this feature align with XYZ goal? If yes, continue; if no, put it in another box.
What’s one change that you wanted to make but ended up dismissing because it would have caused PatchRx to stray from its core mission?
Our core mission has always been to find a way to help patients take their medication on time, and because of supply chain issues, we dismissed the PatchCaps and focused on software. It ended up serving us well – we expanded our software into pharmacies and were able to bolster the software side of our business. And now that the PatchCaps are back in the market, our software is in an extremely solid, robust position to attach to the hardware.
Name one founder who would want to be featured in a Founder to Founder Startup Spotlight and/or Case Study?
Matt Barron, CEO at Cariina. Matt’s one of the founders of Boston-based Cariina, a SaaS company for education operations. I love the team they’re building, how they’re thinking through solutions, and how gritty they are about developing something that works for their partners.
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