The Glaucoma Community by Prevent Blindness earns 2022 sponsorship from Glaukos and Santen Pharmaceutical [WASHINGTON, D....
Problem
For people with chronic illnesses, there's no place to get trusted, current, and truly comprehensive information about their disease
At some point, virtually every recently diagnosed person goes online to research their condition. But the Internet is a Wild West of information. Patients can easily find themselves overwhelmed, confused, and misled by what they find.
Pharmaceutical companies also need their patients to be knowledgeable and confident if they are to maintain adherence to their drug regimens.
By convening patients around knowledge and providing them with opportunities to share their lived experiences, Responsum provides its industry partners with an indispensable tool for both supporting and learning from people with chronic illness.
Solution
Building patient knowledge, one community at a time
Responsum creates and manages disease-specific, patient knowledge, and community building apps. Developed from years of research, interviews, and collaboration with patients, our free, disease-specific apps are designed to improve knowledge, grow self-confidence, support needs and concerns, and facilitate the organization and coordination of healthcare information.
Product
Responsum customizes knowledge platforms for chronic disease patient communities
Patients who use Responsum get a team of professional medical researchers and writers, backed by state-of-the-art technology, to scour, curate, and “translate” the Internet for news, blog posts, discoveries, and lifestyle tips about their chronic disease. Rather than constantly performing their own online research and analysis, patients can rely on Responsum's newsfeed and instead spend their time and energy on living and regaining health.
The Responsum app also includes a highly-active, responsibly-moderated Community Chat where patients and medical professionals share experiences, advice, and support. The app also includes patient-designed data organizing tools, like the Patient One-Sheet, to facilitate their ability to track their care and engage efficiently with their numerous healthcare providers.
Traction
4 patient-partnered, commercially supported platforms in the market
Launched in 2019, Responsum now has 4 patient-partnered, commercially supported platforms in the market: Pulmonary Fibrosis, Chronic Kidney Disease, Fibroids, and the Glaucoma Community. An additional app for Long COVID patients was launched in March 2021. Born as a Capstone research project at Carnegie Mellon University's Human Computer Interaction Institute in 2014, we were accepted into the StartUp Health Accelerator Program in 2019. We've since engaged in numerous partnerships with leading patient advocacy groups and pharmaceutical companies. Now profitable, we generated $840K in 2020 revenue.
Customers
Pharmaceutical companies can support their patient communities and receive actionable data
Responsum's key customers are pharmaceutical companies. By partnering with us to underwrite a disease-specific knowledge platform, our commercial supporters simultaneously demonstrate their commitment to serving their patients while gleaning valuable insights into the way patients experience and value healthcare. Responsum has also delivered considerable value by recruiting and screening patients from its communities for clinical trials.
Our patients have an ally on their path to better health
Our apps are carefully designed to keep them informed, connected, and supported. Many of them are reporting positive outcomes from being a Responsum Health member!
Business model
$9M in revenue by 2025
The Responsum Health platform and its services are provided free of charge to all of our users—patients, family members, caregivers, healthcare providers, and medical professionals.
We enter into annual SaaS arrangements with pharmaceutical sponsors of individual platforms or clinical trial recruitment campaigns with gross margins of up to 100% on future platforms. We are now seeing monthly revenue of $72.5K (as of June 2021). In the future, we expect our costs will soon be underwritten by grants from a combination of supporters including foundations, companies, and nonprofits. With our current clients and projected partnership pipeline, we project revenue to reach $9M by 2025.
Market
Our room to grow is virtually limitless
There are thousands of individually identifiable diseases and conditions with 133M+ Americans affected by chronic illness. More patients are turning to the internet as their first source of health information, but misinformation is rampant. The pharmaceutical industry and other stakeholders have a growing imperative to engage, inform, survey, and recruit patients.
Our go-to-market strategy is to meet with, and sell to, pharmaceutical companies with an interest in supporting patients in a given therapeutic area or gleaning insights from patient surveys, engagement, or trial recruitment.
Competition
Peer-to-peer engagement with trustworthy content
Responsum curates the Internet daily and provides patients with independently-vetted, disease-specific, keyword-tagged article summaries directly through an engaging app. As far as we can tell, nobody else does this. Our competitors are either companies like Patients Like Me and Inspire, which convene digital patient communities via disease-specific social walls, or online publishers of disease-specific content aimed at patients. Responsum is an industry leader by convening patient group partners and Expert Advisory Councils comprised of patients and medical experts to guide the search, curation, and summary of the Internet for patients with chronic illness.
Vision and strategy
In discussion with Astellas, AstraZeneca, and others to expand our disease app portfolio
Responsum has a clear path of growth for this coming year, which includes launching new Responsum-led platforms and bringing on new partners. Current opportunities under discussion include projects with Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Astellas, Daichii Sankyo, the National Institutes of Health, and others.
Additionally, the company's recent launch of Responsum for Long COVID presents a unique opportunity to build a multi-sponsored program in this urgently needed area of investment.
Funding
2 years of jet-fueled growth
Key areas of development include doubling the number of our platforms, expanding our patient group partnerships, and investing in the expansion of our business development team.
Founder
Andrew Rosenberg
Founded by a serial entrepreneur, whose healthcare-focused government affairs firm ranks among the largest and most successful in Washington, DC, Responsum Health was borne out of the challenges Andrew Rosenberg faced while attempting to navigate the healthcare system for his ailing mother. He asked, "if it is so difficult for someone like me - who is so steeped in health policy - to find current, trustworthy, and understandable content for my mom on the Internet, I can't imagine how frustrating this experience must be for others." So Andrew spent the next five years, partnering with a cohort of graduate students at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, a team of technology and health experts, and literally hundreds of patients with chronic illness, to develop this revolutionary app and approach to improving patient knowledge.