Virtue Technologies eliminates delivery pain points

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. - A new investment better positions Virtue Technologies to make its platform—which takes an Amazon approach to deliveries, company officials say—available to more providers.

The company, which offers a solution for communicating orders for medical equipment and medications to service providers and patients, announced in November that it had received an investment from Claritas Capital, a Nashville, Tenn.-based private equity firm.

“The delivery of care shouldn't be that difficult,” said Jason Jacobs, COO of Virtue Technologies. “So when we talk about uber, Amazon and Pizza Tracker—that's what we think about when we think, 'How do we make these things easier?' That's the way we're wired and that's what we bring to the market.”

Virtue Technologies is a joint venture between TwelveStone Health Partners, a specialty pharmacy and infusion provider, and VirtueRN, which offers a mobile and cloud-based workflow solution for HME and hospice providers. TwelveStone has previously received investments from Claritas in 2018 and 2017.

TwelveStone had contracted VirtueRN to develop a platform for its business and as the two companies got further into development, they saw the potential for other specialty pharmacy and infusion providers—and so did Claritas.

“We understood their workflow process and that the pain points they had were not unique to them,” Jacobs said. “We said, 'Let's build this, but we should also consider taking this out to the entire market.'”

Virtue Technologies signed on two other specialty pharmacy and home infusion providers within weeks of going live that were drawn by the platform's ability to help reduce the 40% of pain points related to delivery status, company officials say. The platform streamlines deliveries by automatically pulling down demographic information and optimizing routes, allowing dispatch managers to, with just a few clicks, shoot them out to drivers via an app.

“It's like ants on a screen—the manager can also see all the drivers for a given time, in real-time, so there's no need for phone calls or phone tag,” said CEO Gibran Ameer. “You can dispatch faster and deliver faster. There's the potential to save 30 minutes on every single route.”

Next steps for Virtue Technologies include more firmly integrating with other software providers and scaling the platform to markets beyond infusion, like home health and hospice.

“These providers are flying around the U.S. with very little visibility of what their day entails,” Ameer said.