POCP Blog

By Tony Schueth, CEO & Managing Partner

Last week, LinkedIn announced my 12^th year at Point-of-Care Partners (POCP). Since I started the company, that makes POCP 12 years old.  

Having been in business the same number of years it takes to graduate high school, I thought others might be interested in how we got started and what has provided the foundation for our success.

Eight months before I started POCP,  I had been part of a “right-sizing” to position my previous employer for an IPO.  A tenured employee in good standing with a solid company in that era, I received a very generous package and outplacement services that enabled me to step back and evaluate where I wanted to go next.     

During that transition period, I started consulting with a small, entrepreneurial technology company in the ePrescribing space. I started to market their product to pharmaceutical manufacturers and helped the tech company with a health plan under contract with a PBM. That experience was eye-opening! It reinforced the fact that I really liked working with different types of companies.

That tech company was “left at the Altar” by a prospective buyer that decided not to purchase them at the last minute.  At the time, they didn’t have the funds to pay me, as my consulting fees were supposed to come from the buyer but my contract was with the “dissed” company.  When they eventually found another buyer, I was offered $.50 on the dollar of what I was owed. I was told that because it was a stock buy-out, there wasn’t likely to be enough to pay off all debtors, and I was low on the priority list. Nonetheless, I decided to see what happened to the purchasing company’s stock; after all, I had earned those fees! What happened was that their stock went from the $1-$2 range – where it had hovered for years – to $13, and they were able to pay me in full.  It reinforced something I already knew – that ePrescribing is “sexy.” 

One of the things the outplacement firm helps you to understand is the realities of starting your own business. An indicator of a likelihood of success is doing something you had been doing in your previous employment. While my functions were different, I worked in the same subject matter – ePrescribing – as I had for my previous employer. 

Our first engagement as POCP was with the PBM. When that concluded, the health plan engaged us. After that, a pharmaceutical manufacturer engaged us. Then I got involved in government-sponsored testimony and pilots with academic institutions, a Blues plan and an electronic health record. All of this was around ePrescribing, and the notion of focusing on a subject matter and working across stakeholders was born. I truly believe that the fact that we have clients from different stakeholder categories makes us more effective.

We sometimes get pigeonholed as being experts in just one subject matter, which isn’t the case. Our job, therefore, is to make the case that we have other areas of expertise. One of the tools we use to do that is our newsletter, which we write ourselves and have published since day 1. Rather than compete against news agencies and outlets, we use it to demonstrate our expertise and remind people we’re here.  It has been effective and well-received, and we still publish it, along with blogs, tweets, whitepapers, etc.

Today we do work in clinical decision support, health information exchange, analytics/outcomes, patient engagement and electronic prior authorization, and we’re still involved in ePrescribing, currently around controlled substances, specialty products, formulary, REMS and data quality.

To be sure, it’s been a fun 12 years!  On a personal note, we have a first-grader who we still have to get through college. Therefore, it’s going to be at least another 12 years!  I’m looking forward to the ride!!

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