EVERSANA, a pharma commercialization company, and Waltz Health, a digital prescription drug company, are merging into a $6 billion entity, they announced on Tuesday.
Chicago-based EVERSANA serves more than 650 pharmaceutical and biotech companies and helps them bring therapies to market. Its services include the distribution of inventory and marketing and advertising to physicians. It also helped Eli Lilly with the creation of LillyDirect, a direct-to-consumer platform that allows patients to access certain Eli Lilly medications, including the GLP-1 Zepbound.
Waltz Health, also based in Chicago, serves payers, employers and pharmacies. It has a platform called Waltz Connect, which matches patients to the most suitable pharmacy for them when they’re prescribed a specialty medication. It also provides health plans information about the member’s condition, prescription, the pharmacy’s contact information and more.
The merger will bring together these companies’ capabilities under the EVERSANA name. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The combined company will continue selling Waltz Connect and building out its pharmacy network. EVERSANA, meanwhile, will create a new model that directly connects pharmaceutical companies to payers and patients, similar to LillyDirect. It will take that model to payers and put it into funded benefit plans.
The companies aim to address the high cost of prescription drugs through the merger, particularly specialty drugs like GLP-1s and oncology therapies. These come with extremely high list prices and often have large rebates attached to them, said Mark Thierer, co-founder and CEO of Waltz Health.
“Our model is actually bridging payers with the pharmaceutical industry, and our hope is to create a business model with less abrasion, less speed bumps to get these therapies into patients’ hands,” Thierer said. “We’re creating a better member experience. … We’re running alongside the current model. We’re not looking to blow it up or in any way disintermediate it.”
Thierer will serve as CEO of the combined company. Prior to Waltz Health, he was the CEO of OptumRx following UnitedHealth Group’s $13 billion acquisition of Catamaran.
EVERSANA’s former CEO, Jim Lang, will be a board member.
Thierer has also been the chairman of EVERSANA for the last eight years, which gave him a “front row seat” in the company.
“The notion of trying to bridge pharmaceutical companies with payers is something that no one had done, and it had been occurring to me over time that this could be a good fit. … We started working together a long time ago on single, standalone initiatives, and as we progressed, it became clearer and clearer that there was a hand-in-glove fit between these organizations and a big opportunity for a strategy play, a first mover to bridge pharma with payers at scale,” he said.
Photo: Stas_V, Getty Images
