Norwalk, Connecticut-based medication adherence platform company HealthPrize has raised $3 million in a new round of funding led by Mansa Capital to help it expand globally. The investment firm has the option to invest an additional $2 million over the course of the next year, according to a report from Dow Jones. HealthPrize, founded in 2009, had previously raised about $4 million from angel investors including dLife Founder Howard Steinberg and former Advo CEO Robert "Kam" Kamerschen.

HealthPrize's mobile and online offering uses education and rewards to help patient take their medications, while also collecting information like accurate prescription-histories and market research about patients verified to be on particular therapies, for their pharmaceutical customers. HealthPrize offers branded pharmaceutical programs for conditions including hypertension, acne, and diabetes.

It has also piloted its diabetes program with an unnamed "top PBM", which HealthPrize said showed adherence lifts for average number of fills per patient increasing 20 to 40 percent over the brand's known baseline.

HealthPrize sells its platform as an SaaS to pharma companies on a brand-by-brand basis. Depending on the pharma company's patient acquisition strategy, patients using that particular medication are then typically invited to the platform via online lead generation campaigns or via "starter-kits" distributed at the point of prescription in their doctor's office. 

In a white paper on the company's site, HealthPrize explains how it thinks differently about medication adherence:

"Digging deeper based on our survey results, we can infer that there is nothing fun about having a chronic condition, nothing fun about being tied to some form of therapy on a daily basis, and certainly nothing fun about being a 'patient'. In other words, there is nothing inherently positive. Modern approaches, then—we believe—must somehow add an element of positivity and even enjoyment to the act of taking a medication (adding the 'fun factor,' if you will). It is no longer adequate to claim that non-adherence is simply a problem of forgetfulness, or of cost, or even of poor health knowledge."

Last week HealthPrize Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Katrina Firlik discussed one of the ways she thought HealthPrize differs from the competition.

"One of our unique and valuable features is that we offer a variety of prescription verification methods," she wrote. "In combination, these methods allow us to verify any prescription, filled anywhere by anyone, while the patient is engaged with our platform. As a result, we can offer our pharmaceutical clients not only the assurance that we are measuring engagement and adherence in patients actually taking their specific branded medication, but we know for certain how many times patients filled their prescriptions while with us. Many adherence interventions (reminder apps, in particular) don’t verify prescriptions at all, which puts us ahead of the game in that respect."