This Healthcare Tech Stock Wants to Cut Out the Middleman

Digital health solutions company OptimizeRx (OPRX 1.98%) connects pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and patients via the thing doctors look at most: electronic health records. Could this approach eliminate the need for pharmaceutical sales representatives?

In this video from "Beat & Raise" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on Sept. 23, tech, healthcare, and cannabis editor and analyst Olivia Zitkus provides a rundown of OptimizeRx's business, recent financials, and whether she believes the stock is worth buying now.

Olivia Zitkus: Next up, Fools, we're talking about OptimizeRx which is a digital health solutions company. Its effort is to connect patients and care providers, and also, I don't think Doximity has this element, life science companies and pharma companies do its network. It's trying to market drugs to doctors, via these electronic health records that Taylor mentioned, these EHRs. Effectively, they're trying to cut out pharmaceutical reps that have historically had to sell medication to prescribers.

OptimizeRx is bringing drug solutions to the provider and to the patient at point of care, so they call it, during an appointment. As Taylor mentioned, during the work day, not during scroll hours in the breakroom. But OptimizeRx, they are trying to capture a piece of a really large market which is $20 billion in spend that pharma companies put out every year to pay for products marketing, that's a scary amount of money. OptimizeRx recently, actually, announced a new functionality that allows these pharma companies to simplify therapy initiation of their drugs. If they're marketing a drug to a doctor they can present the doctor with a fully electronic option to synchronize enrollment, benefits verification, authorization, and patient support onboarding. Part of the company's effort is really to make sure that the patient gets the right drug at the right time and that they stay on the medication for as long as is necessary, because drop-off is such a large issue for many people.

Just a quick financial rundown. The goal basically for the company at this point is to get more pharma companies, the customer to sign to the technology platform and as of the end of July, 80% of the top 50 largest pharma companies in the U.S. had a contract with OptimizeRx and the renewal rate for those companies is about 86%. In their latest financial results, total revenue for three months ended back in June was about $13.6 million which was 55% year-over-year growth, I believe, I think it was $8.8 million in 2020. The gross margin hasn't budged a whole lot, it's about 59% up from last year's 58%. But they are hoping that grows as they build out their platform and offer services with higher individual margins. They have their non-GAAP net income in the second quarter at $1.8 million or $0.10 per share and their cash on hand's about $83 million, just barely above their $82. It seems a lot of their development at the moment has stalled their development of product, I should say, while they try to bring companies in the door and get them signed on.

This stock is expensive, too, not as expensive as Doximity but it's [laughs] trading at a price-to-sales ratio of about 23 which is way above the healthcare average of 4.9, but it's important to look at this as a tech stock. GoodRx, which I would say is also a competitor, it only shows one of the roles that OptimizeRx is trying do but GoodRx also tries to bridge the gap between insurance pharmaceutical providers and patients and that's trading at about 27 price-to-sales ratio. It's trading like a tech stock, the stock itself is up for 530% since it went public and almost 300% over the past 12 months. Right now, I'm just asking myself, is 55% revenue growth in the last quarter enough to merit buying the stock right now? I'm not sure I have enough conviction in its ability to keep expanding its suite of offerings, yet, to pharmaceutical companies but I don't think my doubt is in the fact that there's plenty of empty space for the business to move into, there a lot of EHRs in America, over 500, and a lot of them aren't synchronized and don't let pharma reps into their systems very easily. Not for the risk intolerant but I'm optimistic about the direction this one's heading in.