SOUTHBOROUGH, MA–RxAdvance Founder and CEO Ravi Ika announced that former Apple CEO John Sculley, who has been an RxAdvance founding investor and vice chairman, has accepted the expanded role as Chairman of the Board and Chief Marketing Officer.

“Great entrepreneurs start with a ‘Nobel Cause’. The more time I spend with Ravi, the more I appreciate that he has created something truly amazing,” says John Sculley. “After leaving Apple, I have acted as an advisor, investor, and board member in over two dozen companies. RxAdvance is the first company that has inspired me to get involved as an operating partner.”

From left to right: Ika, Sculley and Kota
From left to right: Ika, Sculley and Kota

Indian-American entrepreneur Subu Kota, president of the Boston Group USA, also serves on the board of RxAdvance. Other Indian-American board members include Devaiah Pagidipati and Krishna Ika.

The $370 billion Pharmacy Benefit Management (PBM) industry is encumbered with huge administrative inefficiencies, obsolete transaction methodologies, legacy systems, limited service offerings, and a lack of a single point of accountability, RxAdvance said in a statement. This introduces over $350 billion of avoidable drug-impacted medical costs, which is half of the total $700 billon avoidable medical costs in the healthcare system. If optimized correctly, half of these savings are more than enough to fund the uninsured and underinsured, while also reducing premiums for all Americans, according to the statement.

“As we were building RxAdvance, we collectively began to understand that the Rx ecosystem is a huge untapped opportunity for the US health system to save hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Our disruptive solutions revolve around machine learning and collaborative process automation among patients through the mobile cloud, prescribers at the point of care, pharmacists at the point of sale, and clinical pharmacy staff at plan sponsor through their workflows. Convincing John Sculley to join our management team was a great step forward toward positioning RxAdvance as the most transformationally innovative company in healthcare”, says RxAdvance founder Ika.

Southborough-based RxAdvance is a national full-service pharmacy benefit manager that leverages Collaborative PBM Cloud™ to deliver integrated PBM services that reduce overall pharmacy costs, optimize specialty spend by converting from “Buy & Bill” to “Authorize & Manage”, and reduce avoidable drug-impacted medical costs while improving patient’s quality of life with unmatched regulatory compliance and transparency.