Meet Massachusetts’s 101 Top Founders in the Information Technology Space

Ravi Ika

President, Founder & Chief Executive Officer of RxAdvance

A noted entrepreneur and an innovator of disruptive business solutions, Ravi Ika founded RxAdvance in 2013 and serves as president and chief executive officer of the full service pharmacy benefit management (PBM) company. He launched RxAdvance to lower pharmacy, specialty and avoidable drug-impacted medical costs and achieve better outcomes, quality and compliance in the new era of value-based health care. The RxAdvance platform Mr. Ika created from the ground up, the Collaborative PBM Cloud™, provides comprehensive automated services for all PBM administrative, clinical, specialty management, care stakeholder engagement, and compliance management functions. It does so in a way never before imagined in the PBM industry. The Collaborative PBM Cloud™ combines pharmacy, medical, and lab information to deliver actionable intelligence. Prescribers receive this real time actionable intelligence at the point of care, pharmacists at point of sale, patients via mobile cloud and payers clinical and pharmacy staff engagement through their workflows. Among the valuable results: Lower costs, optimal utilization, better outcomes, higher quality, greater transparency and rigorous compliance. Mr. Ika envisions a $750 billion PBM market long in need of transformation. The five largest PBMs, which manage over 80% of $300 billion in pharmacy benefit spend, provide limited, siloed services using antiquated, legacy platforms. Their lack of holistic vision introduces an additional $350 billion of avoidable drug-impacted medical costs into U.S. health care. In addition, $100 billion in poorly managed “buy and bill” specialty drug spend needs to be converted to an “authorize and manage” model. More than 15 years ago, Mr. Ika recognized a similar transformational opportunity in health insurance. Industry insiders, challenged to reduce administrative costs by 30% and avoidable medical costs by 20%, saw the goals as unachievable. Mired in paper-based processes, the industry also struggled with a myriad of fragmented, inflexible, and expensive legacy systems. Mr. Ika responded to this opportunity with ikaSystems, an enterprise payer-platform company. Disrupting obsolete paradigms, he delivered unprecedented change long before passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The ikaSystems platform decreased administrative costs for many health insurers by as much as 50% and significantly reduced avoidable medical costs. With these results, ikaSystems raised more than $140mm capital from Providence Equity and Essex Woodland Ventures. Known for building and inspiring world-class teams, Mr. Ika takes a hands-on approach to ensure his clients’ success. Over the years, healthcare industry leaders have come to rely on his vision and talent for creating enterprise platforms that radically disrupt legacy business paradigms and deliver significant value. Mr. Ika has a master’s degree in environmental engineering from Old Dominion University and worked as a research scientist at Harvard University prior to his entrepreneurial career.

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About RxAdvance: RxAdvance, a national full service PBM, leverages disruptive Collaborative PBM Cloud™ to manage standard & specialty drug benefits.

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