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 corporations and helps them carry therapies to market. Its providers embody the distribution of stock and advertising and marketing and promoting to physicians. It additionally helped Eli Lilly with the creation of LillyDirect, a direct-to-consumer platform that enables sufferers to entry sure Eli Lilly drugs, 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 treatment. It additionally gives well being plans details about the member’s situation, prescription, the pharmacy’s contact data and extra.
The merger will carry collectively these corporations’ capabilities underneath the EVERSANA identify. 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 instantly connects pharmaceutical corporations to payers and sufferers, just like LillyDirect. It should take that mannequin to payers and put it into funded profit plans.
The businesses intention to handle the excessive price of pharmaceuticals by way of the merger, significantly specialty medicine like GLP-1s and oncology therapies. These include extraordinarily excessive record costs and sometimes have giant rebates hooked up 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 operating alongside the present mannequin. We’re not seeking to blow it up or in any means 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, shall 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 attempting to bridge pharmaceutical corporations with payers is one thing that nobody had completed, and it had been occurring to me over time that this could possibly be a great match. … We began working collectively a very long time in the past on single, standalone initiatives, and as we progressed, it grew to become clearer and clearer that there was a hand-in-glove match between these organizations and an enormous alternative for a method play, a primary mover to bridge pharma with payers at scale,” he stated.
Photograph: Stas_V, Getty Photos
