MyMeds&Me acquisition paves path for pharmacovigilance expansion

MyMeds&Me has been acquired by Drug Safety and Pharmacovigilance Services Solutions (DSS), a portfolio company of Stanley Capital Partners. The purchase of MyMeds&Me by DSS (which offers pharmacovigilance services under the Bioclinica Brand) reportedly will enable the organization to provide “best in class” PV services that meet both current and future industry needs.

To learn more about the acquisition of MyMeds&Me and what the acquisition by DSS might mean for the industry, Outsourcing-Pharma connected with Andrew Rut, CEO and director of the company.

OSP: Could you please share the ‘elevator presentation’ description of MyMeds&Me—who you are, what you do, key capabilities/services, and what sets you apart from other companies operating in this same sphere?​

AR: MyMeds&Me is a specialist drug safety technology company that helps the pharma industry capture safety information from patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals - providing robust, representative datasets which can accelerate insights into their medicines.

Pharmacovigilance (PV) plays a vital role in the drug lifecycle. Its objective is to understand the true risk profile of medicines as early as possible, especially following launch when that profile is largely unknown. This includes building an understanding of populations or sub-groups most at risk so those risks can be mitigated, enabling pharma to optimize labeling, patient adherence, and trust.

Then, as the product becomes more established PV teams monitor product quality, novel drug interactions, and any significant changes to the risk profile. These decisions must be driven by large volumes of good data to ensure optimal prescribing and use of medicines.

That’s where MyMeds&Me comes in. We help pharma companies and their PV vendors to capture standardized adverse event data across all their intake routes, providing a single platform with different views for different users (patients, HCPs, call centers, PSP staff, sales teams, etc.) to guide them through a reporting process and ensure all necessary information is captured on first interaction.

This streamlines downstream PV processes by eliminating the need for manual data entry and significantly reducing the need for follow-up. Cases can also be automatically triaged to medical experts for review and data is transferred data directly into the safety database for rapid signal management.

OSP: Could you please tell us about the Reportum platform, including how it works and how it improves upon other offerings in this space?​

AR: Intake is one of the greatest challenges for PV teams as data can come from many sources – over the phone to a call center, via email, a report from a doctor to a sales rep, and even comments on social media. This results in a huge variation in the type and quality of data captured, which someone must then manually enter into a central database and assess for completeness.

Reportum addresses this problem by enabling reporting in real-time through the user’s channel of choice, whether that be an intuitive web interface, chatbot, voicebot, or surfaced through an expert via a patient support program or call center. The interface is tailored to the type of users, product portfolio, and language providing a dynamic experience that exports structured, high-value data direct to PV teams for analysis.

The landscape of drug safety is far broader than may be apparent, given that only between 1:10 and 1:1000 patients experiencing an adverse drug reaction (ADR) actually report it. How can we as an industry make decisions and communicate the safety of medicines if we don’t have all the data?

The only way we can achieve that is to make it easier to report side effects, minor as well as severe events so that we have a complete picture of product safety across populations. It is important to note that using a scalable digital platform means this can be achieved without any need for increased resourcing.

I was recently interested to read that pharma websites are now a major resource for patients researching their medications, second only to primary care physicians. Therefore, it makes sense to provide a route to report adverse events directly through the website, which Reportum enables our clients to do. In fact, some companies are adding the ability to report an adverse event directly from their homepage which I believe is an integral part of building trust and engagement with their patient communities. 

I’ve talked a lot about front-end data capture here and of course, back-end processes are also important to PV teams. The ability to reconcile across systems and surface reports of importance for QC or medical review focuses high-caliber staff on the areas that matter most.

OSP: In the announcement, you talk about talking about how this will empower your company to progress integration of the Reportum platform with other technologies. Could you please elaborate, and tell us why this is beneficial?​

AR: We have a strong roadmap for the development of Reportum to further improve safety data capture, workflow, and management and are now able to accelerate that progress through a combination of in-house development, partnering, and acquisition.

Key priorities include integration with upstream systems and leveraging AI and machine learning capabilities within the Reportum platform. We also want to address the remaining intake routes so that all safety cases, whatever their source, can go through a single channel.

OSP: Do you have any specific business goals/plans for MyMeds&Me following this acquisition—i.e. other new products, partnerships, expansion plans, etc.?​

AR: Becoming part of the Stanley Capital DSS portfolio is a really exciting step for MyMeds&Me. Our combined goal is to create a digital-first organization that can build on the foundations of two class-leading businesses – DSS in PV services and MyMeds&Me in PV technology – to provide an end-to-end solution that not only increases efficiencies today but also has the vision to shape the future drug safety landscape.

This will mean bringing together best-of-breed technologies, services, and people to provide a differentiated offering that spans the drug lifecycle from large clinical trials to post-approval programs and then established products.

OSP: Do you have anything to add?​

AR: As a physician who’s led teams across drug discovery and development, I strongly believe that the provision of medicines and healthcare must be at the individual level. Having a world-class PV operation that surfaces the best possible safety data for analysis will provide the knowledge that drives that individualization of prescribing. Building the capability to support this will be a mission of the new organization because it matters to patients personally, whether the medicine they are taking will provide benefit or do harm.