EVERSANA, a pharma commercialization firm, and Waltz Well being, a digital prescription drug firm, are merging right into a $6 billion entity, they introduced on Tuesday.
Chicago-based EVERSANA serves greater than 650 pharmaceutical and biotech firms and helps them convey therapies to market. Its providers embody the distribution of stock and advertising and promoting to physicians. It additionally helped Eli Lilly with the creation of LillyDirect, a direct-to-consumer platform that permits sufferers to entry sure Eli Lilly medicines, together with the GLP-1 Zepbound.
Waltz Well being, additionally primarily based in Chicago, serves payers, employers and pharmacies. It has a platform known as Waltz Join, which matches sufferers to probably the most appropriate pharmacy for them once they’re prescribed a specialty remedy. It additionally gives well being plans details about the member’s situation, prescription, the pharmacy’s contact data and extra.
The merger will convey collectively these firms’ capabilities below the EVERSANA title. The phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed.
The mixed firm will proceed promoting Waltz Join and constructing out its pharmacy community. EVERSANA, in the meantime, will create a brand new mannequin that immediately connects pharmaceutical firms to payers and sufferers, much like LillyDirect. It’ll take that mannequin to payers and put it into funded profit plans.
The businesses goal to deal with the excessive price of prescribed drugs by the merger, notably specialty medication like GLP-1s and oncology therapies. These include extraordinarily excessive listing costs and sometimes have massive rebates connected to them, stated Mark Thierer, co-founder and CEO of Waltz Well being.
“Our mannequin is definitely bridging payers with the pharmaceutical trade, and our hope is to create a enterprise mannequin with much less abrasion, much less velocity bumps to get these therapies into sufferers’ arms,” Thierer stated. “We’re creating a greater member expertise. … We’re working alongside the present mannequin. We’re not seeking to blow it up or in any method disintermediate it.”
Thierer will function CEO of the mixed firm. Previous to Waltz Well being, he was the CEO of OptumRx following UnitedHealth Group’s $13 billion acquisition of Catamaran.
EVERSANA’s former CEO, Jim Lang, might be a board member.
Thierer has additionally been the chairman of EVERSANA for the final eight years, which gave him a “entrance row seat” within the firm.
“The notion of making an attempt to bridge pharmaceutical firms with payers is one thing that nobody had carried out, and it had been occurring to me over time that this may very well be a great match. … We began working collectively a very long time in the past on single, standalone initiatives, and as we progressed, it turned clearer and clearer that there was a hand-in-glove match between these organizations and a giant alternative for a technique play, a primary mover to bridge pharma with payers at scale,” he stated.
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