10 Amazing Women Leaders to Watch 2024
Our solution aims to empower pharmacists, healthcare providers, and patients in safe and effective medication management: Veronique Michaud of GalenusRx
The Silicon Review
GalenusRx is a cutting-edge, knowledge-based clinical decision support system platform and precision medication safety company that applies clinician-informed machine learning to complex algorithms using a unique and proprietary scientific approach to optimize medication regimens.
The company is based on advanced scientific knowledge and peer-reviewed publications, which demonstrate that the proposed strategy offers benefits to patients and organizations.
During a 2023 round of Angel investors, GalenusRx received numerous spontaneous testimonies from patients and their families about how a personalized medication management strategy changed their quality of life. How precise, sometimes simple, interventions have completely changed their outcomes, from avoiding surgeries to deprescribing inappropriate medications and avoiding side effects.
GalenusRx partners with various organizations to offer advanced services to their clients or patients. Its target is pharmacists who are willing to offer advanced services to their patients. The company’s strategy is to grow to support large healthcare organizations, hospital networks, health insurance and re-insurance companies, physician organizations, and the pharmaceutical industry. The company’s 2024 target is to service more than 50,000 patients.
The Silicon Review reached out to Veronique Michaud, Co-Founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer of GalenusRx, and here’s what she had to say.
Interview Highlights
Q. What was the motivation behind starting GalenusRx?
We all know a family member, friend, or patient who has experienced severe medication-related side effects or even died due to a bad combination of medications. With current knowledge, this should not happen anymore.
As a pharmacist, I consider the best possible options when using medications as a treatment strategy. As a researcher, I translate the complex science underlying the causes of adverse drug events into understandable and applicable information. Such a desire, both as a pharmacist and as a researcher, led to the creation of products to ease the management of multi-drug interactions in polymedicated patients. Throughout my career in both academia and industry, my work has centered around the development of knowledge on multi-drug interactions, pharmacogenomics, and the impact of diseases on intersubject variability in drug response.
It was hard to pursue my goals, and more importantly, to follow my convictions, in academia or in a large corporation. It became the most judicious and rational decision to convert more than 20 years of intense work in research and industry into a valuable objective. I co-founded GalenusRx, where we envision more precise and efficient solutions that have a greater impact on patient lives. Our unique expertise and technologies should be implemented to benefit as many patients as possible.
Q. Can you explain your services in brief?
GalenusRx offers the most advanced clinical decision-support system to help clinicians make appropriate interventions for patients taking multiple drugs. The GalenusRx products provide meaningful information, offer personalized medication regimen assessments, and address the growing health problem of adverse drug events and polypharmacy. The products do not look at one-to-one drug combinations and interactions but rather use clinician-informed machine learning and complex algorithms to consider all drugs—10, 20, or 30 medications—all at the same time to quantitatively estimate the appropriateness of the entire drug regimen.
Q. How do your solutions affect healthcare costs?
Our publications over the last 25 years have shown that strategies like the solutions developed by GalenusRx can optimize medication regimens and reduce adverse drug events, including death. Our proprietary algorithms help identify patients at an increased level of concern and inform interventions by expert pharmacists with the help of our advanced clinical decision support system.
Our publications have also shown that our assessment of drug regimen appropriateness—or, I should say, inappropriateness—is associated with medical expenditures, hospitalizations, emergency department visits, falls, adverse drug events, and death. But more importantly, our previous research works have shown that pharmacists’ interventions and implementation of our recommendations can reverse the unwanted effects and improve patient outcomes.
Drug-related problems, including adverse drug events, have a considerable impact both from a clinical and economic perspective. The management of adverse drug events is complex and can cost up to $30 billion annually in the U.S. Adverse drug events are responsible for up to 30% of hospital admissions, prolonged hospital stays, may trigger prescription cascades, and disability or death. It is known that the cost per preventable adverse drug event is estimated to be higher than for non-preventable adverse drug events. So, it is time to recognize that our health system unintentionally causes harm to patients! With the proper solution, we can reduce the economic burden associated with preventable adverse drug events. GalenusRx offers a suite of solutions to preemptively identify: 1) patients at high level of concern for adverse drug events; and 2) drugs that trigger this increased risk.
Q. How does your solution align with the existing medical practice?
Inappropriate drug use and adverse drug events are the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. Studies have shown that up to 80% of adverse drug events are preventable.
Unfortunately, the healthcare system is very fragmented, and patients with multiple chronic and acute diseases see several different physicians and specialists. These specialists establish the appropriate treatment for each of their respective specialties based on disease-treatment guidelines published by intelligent and scientific societies. Such recommendations are based on clinical trial results and best practice guidelines.
The problem is that there is no quarterback to review whether the combination of these 10, 20, or 30 drugs makes sense; the effects or side-effects of drug “A” counteract the actions of drug “F”, or drug “B” is only prescribed to circumvent a side-effect caused by drug “D”. This can lead to a prescription cascade and polypharmacy.
Our solutions consider all treatment guidelines for all diseases simultaneously. Drug selection, dose adjustment, and time and sequence of administration are designed to avoid the collusion of all these medications in the liver, kidneys, heart, or brain.
Current practice favors the simple and popular method of improving medication adherence—by limiting the time of day the medication is taken, typically at breakfast and at bedtime. While this solution may work for patients taking a small number of drugs, it can have a negative impact on patients taking multiple drugs. In essence, the best way to expose patients to drug interactions and side effects is to have patients take all their drugs at the same time. Imagine taking 15 different drugs at breakfast and six more at bedtime!
Adverse drug events are an economic burden on patients, healthcare providers, healthcare systems, health insurance, and the pharmaceutical industry. Our technology can play a key role in the continuum of care, help manage drug safety programs, and reduce potential legal and financial consequences. Our solution aims to empower pharmacists, healthcare providers, and patients in safe and effective medication management.
Q. Have you always been entrepreneurial? What led you to taking that first step and setting up your own business?
I never planned to be an entrepreneur; it was not a goal in my life. After I completed my pharmacy degree, I practiced in community pharmacy for eight years. Here, I routinely encountered medication-related problems—which are often overlooked by healthcare providers—and realized the burden of polypharmacy, inappropriate medications, and adverse drug events.
As a health professional, I am committed to providing patients with the best, safest care. I completed a master’s degree (MSc) and a PhD, followed by two post-doctoral research fellowships (one at McGill University, Montreal and one at Indiana University, Indianapolis) studying mechanisms underlying intersubject variability in drug responses. After 17 years of extensive academic training, I founded my laboratory and led independent drug safety research.
I was very passionate when I started my career in academia; however, there was a limited implementation path to execution. So, I aspired to transform the way we currently do health sciences and realized that we do not thoroughly address medication safety and the hidden epidemic of polypharmacy.
My desire to translate the complex science underlying the causes of adverse drug events led to the creation of products that ease multi-drug interaction management in polymedicated patients. In 2001, I was a co-partner in the creation of IntermedRx, a spin-off company from the Université de Montréal. While I was still a full-time professor at the Université de Montréal and researcher at the Centre de Recherche du Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal, our tool evolved into a web-based application and was used by community pharmacists in more than 100 community pharmacies and by specialty pharmacists in 10 hospitals in Canada. In 2013, a license was granted to CareKinesis (USA). Then, in 2016, IntermedRx was bought by Tabula Rasa HealthCare, a U.S.-based company, and I moved to the U.S. to work for TRHC at that time. In 2019, the company launched the Precision Pharmacotherapy Research and Development Institute, for which I was the Chief Operating Officer. In three years, the institute published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, focusing mostly on medication safety for older adults.
My core values were being challenged. I took this opportunity to innovate as an individual and as part of a team by forging my own path. As I matured professionally, it was clear that being an entrepreneur in healthcare would yield tangible results. As co-founder of GalenusRx, we can improve people’s lives and save people’s lives. Medication problems do not only affect older adults, and I believe we can provide better healthcare experiences for all people.
Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?
Yes, GalenusRx is only one year old. GalenusRx is people first, for people. In the last year, we meticulously recruited talented individuals from different backgrounds to help accomplish our mission. Alignment on strategies for achieving our purpose is what brings our team together. We all witness how our products and interventions impact patients.
Our platform was developed in 2023, and GalenusRx products entered the market on 1/1/2024. Every member of GalenusRx is committed to offering the best clinical services possible to all patients, particularly underserved polymedicated patients.
Additionally, through the continuum medication safety cycle, our innovative technology can assess the safety of a new drug entity. Drug safety evaluation is rigorous during the pre-marketing clinical phases. However, it does not fully represent real-world situations. GalenusRx uses real-world drug regimens to simulate the impact of a new chemical entity on adult populations before exposing patients to the new medication. More importantly, our solution is inclusive by assessing the risk in marginalized populations, which are usually excluded from clinical trials.
Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?
Our dream is for our products to be used throughout the USA and internationally, as the same problems of polypharmacy and adverse drug events exist globally. GalenusRx products can be integrated into various electronic health record platforms in a variety of healthcare settings.
Veronique Michaud | In Her Own Words
I never dreamed of being a company founder. Throughout my formation, I had an “academic” dream in mind, inspired by my role models. Opportunities presented themselves that I perceived as new ways to achieve my objectives.
I believe a lot in investing in people who share the same aspirations and mission-driven objectives. Nothing can be realized alone, but being surrounded by the right team of colleagues makes everything possible. Luckily, I found that the individuals who I valued having on my team were willing to follow me in this new adventure.
GalenusRx is still very young. It will grow and progress through various phases in life, and at maturity, it will be the best thing that I have ever done for patients.