Five Questions with a Startup CEO: Blake Marggraff of Epharmix

Blake Marggraff, CEO, Epharmix

About Epharmix

Epharmix creates technology that helps keep high-risk and rising-risk patients in touch with their outpatient care managers. Through rigorous research and development processes, the final technologies can help care management teams drive clinical and financial outcomes while increasing productivity.

What does your company do best?

Epharmix excels at keeping patients with chronic diseases actively engaged for months and years. Health technologist Leonard Kish was uniquely prescient when he described patient engagement as the “blockbuster drug of the century,” because an engaged patient enables lower-cost, higher-quality care, particularly when that individual has multiple chronic conditions that need to be monitored and managed.

If you could change one thing about your product/service or industry-what would it be and why?

I would increase the financial and clinical transparency for patients across the entire industry. Healthcare is rife with “black boxes:” complex pricing and rebate schedules, indecipherable dependencies, and complex terminology. If patients could more easily understand how the cogs meshed, I believe they would make decisions that would help drive the industry toward more progressive models.

Startups sometimes experience growing pains, what helps you get through these startup cycles?

Constant analysis and revision of our culture and internal processes keep our company and product growing, and my team and I surround ourselves with mentors to learn as much as possible from individuals with a collectively broad range of expertise.

What has surprised you during your time with this startup?

One of the most pleasant surprises: every care provider with whom our team interacts genuinely wants to do what is best for the patient. As such, it’s reassuring to know that we’re all on the same team, even when complex and convoluted incentive structures result in inefficiency and frustration.

What advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur?

Execute. As soon as you’ve picked a direction and set quantitative, time-based goals that you believe will tell you whether your thesis for product/market-fit is accurate, start working toward that goals and don’t stop until you are sure you’ve either failed or succeeded. When you fail to accomplish a goal, determine which key assumptions were inaccurate, make course corrections as necessary, then begin again.

For more in formation, please visit the Epharmix website at: demo.epharmix.com.