Startup lets doctors enter prescriptions on iPad

BOULDER (Reuters) - Imagine your health hinging on your doctor's penmanship. That's a scenario ScriptPad is trying to avoid by offering physicians the ability to enter prescriptions directly into their iPhone or iPad.

"It allows physicians to write prescriptions faster and safer than their current paper process," said Liam Davis-Mead, 31, co-founder and CTO of the Boulder, Colorado-based startup.

Davis-Mead said as many as 40 percent of prescriptions contain some sort of medication error, from improper dosing to overlooked interactions with other drugs and just simply because pharmacists can't read the doctor's messy handwriting.

The technology was developed by software programer and CEO Shane Taylor, who said his father, who takes 26 medications to fight heart disease and cancer, nearly died "on a few occasions" due to prescription errors.

"When you have that many moving parts with a particular patient, sometimes you can miss things," said the 31-year-old Taylor, a recent graduate of Boulder's TechStars startup incubator program. "ScriptPad could have solved a lot of the problems that I've seen with poor medication management."

Davis-Mead said when seeing a patient, a physician can use their iPhone or iPad to pull up basic information about the patient. The doctor then fills out the drug name and the dosages show up on the screen. They can then select from a list pharmacies where the patient can easily fill the prescription. ScriptPad (www.scriptpad.net)receives an undisclosed transaction fee from the pharmacy for every prescription.

Davis-Mead said the company plans to launch the free version of its app by the end of the year and hopes to roll out a premium subscription-based service within the next eight to nine months that would charge physicians $49 per month. He added the cost is offset by federal financial incentives for switching to electronic medical recording technology and that doctors would actually stand to make an average of about $3,500 a year from shelving their notepads.

THE PITCH

Taylor said approximately 10 percent of prescriptions today are sent electronically.

"The paper process is still the dominant process -- realistically this is not how medication management needs to be done," he said.

The Obama administration intends to start penalizing doctors who do not convert, said Davis-Mead, adding it's likely "a bar that's set too high for them."

"By giving them a smaller solution that they can adopt to get them in that direction - that's something that physicians are receptive to," he said.

ScriptPad is targeting smaller practices with between one and five doctors. Nurse practitioners, physician assistants and administrative staff can also use the application to handle clerical issues around the device.

Davis-Mead said that over the next year, they hope to accumulate about 1,000 paying customers. He added that in 2010, revenue should be between $20,000 and $30,000.

ScriptPad received $12,000 from TechStars in return for a 6-percent equity stake in the company and are looking to raise an additional $300,000 seed round from angel investors. The new funds will be used to hire two developers as well as a designer in order to help the company scale to other platforms faster, said Davis-Mead. He added ScriptPad aims to have their application available on the Android within the next six months.

One of the company's biggest challenges is convincing older physicians to adopt the new technology and recommend it to colleagues.

"They're simply accustomed to doing things the way they've been doing them for many years," Davis-Mead said. "Getting that initial user base is going to be our biggest challenge."