A health IT company that set out to make clinical trials easier to manage for pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech companies shifted its business model. Now, after 18 months, ProofPilot has launched a Software as a Service to support research by nonprofit organizations. The idea is to help them design and execute studies at a more affordable price to quantify the effectiveness of their programs.
The goal of the company, which graduated from Blueprint Health’s accelerator in 2014, is to help any nonprofit run a randomized control trial. The idea is to design studies so that nonprofits can more easily quantify which programs are working and which ones are not.
In an interview with ProofPilot CEO and Co-founder Matthew Amsden, he summarized the company’s experience.
“We have become more mission driven,” he said. “We took a big risk 18 months ago to re-architect this experience. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made in the last couple of years.”
Amsden added that the problem with the previous model was that it didn’t work for the audience for which it was geared. “We felt like we were doing the studies for the companies rather than helping train them. I felt like we were becoming a technology firm dependent on professional services to survive.”
Among its clients are HicCup and its initiative The Way to Wellville — a 5 year national challenge across five communities to make significant and lasting improvements in five measures of health and economic vitality, according to its website. The communities include Clatsop County, Oregon; Greater Muskegon, Michigan; Lake County, California; Niagara Falls, New York; and Spartanburg, South Carolina.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
With ProofPilot’s revamped model, its customers have the ability to contribute to breakthroughs and learn information about new prevention, wellness and health optimization techniques, according to ProofPilot’s website.
Amsden noted that its prohibitively expensive for small organizations to do the kind of research larger groups do. “They can’t do research on their [own] interventions because it’s too costly. Our goal is to bring the price down and make [these studies] more accessible to individuals.”
