While online retailers have made significant inroads against physical stores in the sales of books, music, food and countless other types of products, medication is one area that hasn’t caught up to the digital age yet, though some innovators are looking to change that situation.

At the Girls in Tech – Amplify Women’s Pitch Night 2016 event in San Francisco, CA, Sophia Yen, MD, MPH and CEO and co-founder of Pandia Health Inc., joined Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about her company’s efforts to improve online access to medications.

Convenience and care

With Pandia Health currently focused on birth control access, Yen shared some of the motivations driving her company’s work. Describing her goal in life as one of making women’s lives easier, she shared data findings of women spending about 10 weeks of their lives running to the pharmacy, waiting for their medication and then getting their medication home.

“In today’s world, everything should just come to you in the mail,” including medications, Yen stated. While finding the appropriate procedures for physicians to verify and approve the relevant prescriptions in the telemedicine context may seem like the biggest challenge to achieving these goals, Yen described how they’d been able to adopt the Californian code for doing so.

Apart from a couple of states with restrictive legislation, she said, her company’s employment of fully trained physicians would enable Pandia to serve the entire nation once it reached sufficient funding and market penetration.

Solving problems

One of the main causes Pandia identified for women not taking their birth control, Yen said, was that they simply didn’t have it on hand; another was that their prescription had expired. Pandia solves both problems by having physicians review the medical application questionnaires, write the prescription for the verified customer and ship it directly to them on a regular basis for as long as the patient wants.

As Yen explained, brick-and-mortar pharmacies, such as CVS and Walgreens, have little incentive to ship medications, as they have more opportunities to make money from incidental purchases when customers come into their stores, which has left this corner of the market uncovered.

Apart from birth control, Pandia is also looking to provide acne treatment prescriptions, which can cut medication costs to a twelfth of the usual price with the appropriate insurance coverage. Yen described the choice of acne medications as the next step in the company’s efforts to expand its telemedicine presence. This is due to the low risk of its side effects.

Yen also sees opportunities for growth in expanding to cover all of the products that people find embarrassing to buy in person at a pharmacy, as well as possibly emulating the success of the Dollar Shave Club by providing an introductory service to various health products.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Girls in Tech – Amplify Women’s Pitch Night 2016.

*Disclosure: Girls in Tech and other companies sponsor some Girls in Tech – Amplify segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Girls in Tech nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Photo by SiliconANGLE