CEO T.J. Parker in the PillPack office in Manchester. Photo by Matthew J. Mowry.
PillPack, a Manchester company, and its young CEO and cofounder T.J. Parker have racked up national accolades, $65 million in venture capital, and customers in 49 states since its launch in 2014.
A writer in Fortune magazine declared, “PillPack Could Change The Way America Takes Its Medicine.” Parker was also named one of Inc. magazine’s 30 Under 30.
Why? This growing startup is putting a different spin on how people get their pills.
“We don’t think pharmacies and health care have to be complicated,” says Parker, who started the company with Elliot Cohen.
Traditionally a patient gets pills in several bottles each with unique directions. With PillPack, patients have their prescriptions forwarded to PillPack, which then sorts them into individual packets that are labeled with time and date to be taken, specific pill names and dosages. Those are then mailed to the patient.
Patients pay their co-pays as they would to any other pharmacy. And pharmacists check each packet for accuracy.
Housed in the Waumbec Mill in Manchester, PillPack has grown from 1,600 square feet two years ago to nearly 80,000 square feet now. It launched with about 12 employees. By May 2016, the company had about 300 employees, the majority of whom are in NH. (There is a smaller office in Massachusetts and a new facility in Utah.)
Growth has come from word of mouth. Last year, PillPack shipped 2 million packets. Today it sends close to 5 million nationwide, Parker says. A typical customer is 40ish and taking four to five pills daily.
Parker is well-versed in how traditional pharmacies work. His dad, Leon “Lenny” Parker, was a pharmacist (and now serves as vice president of PillPack) with his own pharmacy.
But T.J. Parker was inspired by another business his father started, Northeast Pharmacy, that delivered medication to 120 nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Only he wanted to take it further and online. His dad wasn’t sold on the idea until T.J. and Cohen presented their idea at a well-known Hackathon in Boston in 2012 and won.
“From there it snowballed,” T.J.Parker says. “It made sense to really go for it.”
PillPack has been a media darling, but it did hit a well-publicized hurdle when its biggest customer—Express Scripts, one of the largest online pharmacies—removed PillPack from its network in April. Express Scripts claimed PillPack misrepresented itself as a retail pharmacy rather than a mail-order pharmacy. The company represented one-third of PillPack’s business.
So within four days, PillPack went public, tapping experienced advisers to develop an online public relations campaign geared to customers to put pressure on Express Scripts to reinstate the company.
By the end of that month, the two companies spoke, reinstating PillPack as a vendor.
PillPack is looking at opening additional pharmacies across the country in large cities to make deliveries more efficiently. They will be hybrid models of mail-order delivery and retail operations.
“We would like to deliver people’s meds quickly and inexpensively,” Parker says, adding some patients still need to meet with a pharmacist to ask questions and review their meds. Customers currently can access PillPack’s pharmacists either online or by phone, but retail operations would also allow them to do so in person, Parker says.
The company expects to double its staff in the coming year. “We’ve been growing quickly, but we’re still quite small. Our goal as a company is to make it better and simpler for customers.”
For more information, visit pillpack.com.
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