Prior authorization is where prescriptions go to die - PARx keeps them alive70% of patients hit with a PA never get their original medicationPASS reviews most requests in hours, plan decisions typically inside 48 hoursFree to prescribers - the bill goes to drug manufacturers54% of physicians spend an hour a day on prior authorizationsWon the eyeforpharma 2020 Entrepreneur AwardReachable by a network of 500,000+ providers via EHR integrationPrior authorization is where prescriptions go to die - PARx keeps them alive70% of patients hit with a PA never get their original medicationPASS reviews most requests in hours, plan decisions typically inside 48 hoursFree to prescribers - the bill goes to drug manufacturers54% of physicians spend an hour a day on prior authorizationsWon the eyeforpharma 2020 Entrepreneur AwardReachable by a network of 500,000+ providers via EHR integration
Company Dossier // Health IT
PARx Solutions, Burlington, Massachusetts. The logo of a company whose entire job is to make itself invisible - when it works, a prescription simply ships and nobody thinks about the 48 hours of arguing that got it there.
PARx Solutions reads the fine print so your medicine ships.
A Boston-area company that turned one of medicine's most-complained-about chores - prior authorization - into a free service somebody else pays for.
Founded 2008Burlington, MA~38 employeesHealth · SaaS · Services
A business built on the space between "prescribed" and "filled."
Here is a fact that should be more scandalous than it is: when a doctor writes you a prescription, that is not the same as you getting the drug. In between sits a bureaucratic checkpoint called prior authorization - the insurer's demand that someone prove the medication is warranted before it will pay. PARx Solutions is a company that exists entirely inside that gap, and it has been quietly working there since 2008.
The mechanics of prior authorization are dull, which is exactly why they are expensive. A prescriber's staff has to find the right form, fill it out, call a managed care plan, wait, resubmit, and follow up - and while that happens, the patient waits, or gives up. Surveys cited by PARx put numbers on the damage: something like 70% of patients who hit a prior authorization never receive the medication their doctor originally chose. That is not a rounding error. That is the product not shipping.
PARx's answer is a service called PASS - the Prior Authorization Support System. It is a secure web portal bolted to a call center of nurses and reimbursement specialists who do the arguing for you. The clever part is not the software. The clever part is who pays.
The Problem, By The Numbers
Why prior authorization is a tax paid in phone calls.
70%
of patients hitting a PA don't get their original medication
54%
of physicians spend 1+ hour a day on PA requirements
70%
of PA denials are administrative, not clinical
92%
of practice managers find PA increasingly challenging
Figures as presented in PARx Solutions' provider education materials. Treat them as the company's framing of an industry problem, not independently audited statistics.
The Business Model
The users and the payers are different people. On purpose.
The reason PASS is free to physician offices is that PARx does not charge them. Instead, the service is sponsored by pharmaceutical manufacturers who want their products to actually reach patients rather than dying in an insurer's inbox. The doctor gets help. The patient gets the drug. The manufacturer gets the sale it would otherwise have lost to abandonment. Everyone in the chain is nudged toward the same outcome.
It is a genuinely well-aligned arrangement, and it is worth pausing on, because "free" in healthcare usually means "you are the product." Here the incentive is more straightforward: a prescription that gets abandoned is revenue nobody collects, so the party with the most to lose - the manufacturer - foots the bill for getting it approved.
Who benefits from an approved PA
Illustrative alignment of incentives
Patient gets meds
✓
Prescriber saves time
✓
Manufacturer keeps sale
✓
PARx earns sponsorship
✓
"Simplifying the Prior Authorization process for Patients and Prescribers." - the whole company, in one line.
What You Can Actually Do With It
Four things, one job: get the medication through.
Flagship
PASS Portal + Call Center
Initiate and manage a prior authorization through a secure web portal, then hand the follow-up to healthcare and reimbursement specialists who deal with the plan for you. Most requests are reviewed and submitted within a few hours; plan decisions typically land inside 48 hours.
Continuity
PA Renewal Reminders
An alert program that flags when a patient's authorization is about to expire, so an ongoing therapy doesn't silently lapse at renewal and leave a patient without their medication.
Integration
Point-of-Care / EHR
Through partners like OptimizeRx and ZappRx, PARx surfaces its service inside the prescribing workflow - so the PA can be started at the same moment the prescription is written.
Education
Provider Resources
Free guidance for practices, including the "Guide to a Successful PA Process" eBooklet and an ongoing news blog on prior authorization best practices.
The 48-hour clock
Typical turnaround PARx cites for a PASS-handled request
PARx reviews & submits
~hrs
Plan returns a decision
~48h
Speed is the metric that matters to a waiting patient. Hours to submit, roughly two days to answer.
The People
A small team, a second act, and a chairman from the last one.
PARx is led by Dan Rubin, President and CEO, who took the top job in 2012. Rubin is a healthcare-services lifer: he co-founded Adheris in 1993 and ran it for fifteen years before it was acquired. Prior authorization is, in a sense, his second act - the kind of unglamorous, everybody-complains-about-it problem that a founder returns to precisely because it has been left unsolved. The board chairman, Michael Evanisko, was a co-founder of Adheris too, which tells you this is a team that has worked the pharmaceutical-access beat together for a long time.
Dan Rubin
President & CEO
Michael Evanisko
Chairman
Jeffrey S. Anderson
President
Bobby Davis
Founder & Chief Commercial Officer
Howie Rodenstein
Chief Financial Officer
Nick Leighton
SVP & Chief Information Officer
John Doster
SVP, Operations
Mark Ovaitt
VP, Sales
Milestones
The paper trail.
2008
PARx Solutions founded to tackle prior authorization for physician practices.
2012
Dan Rubin becomes President & CEO.
2013
Raises $750K in conventional debt financing.
2015 · May
Closes a $4.41M funding round; Grey Healthcare Group among backers.
2017 · Apr
Partners with OptimizeRx to bring PA to the point of care.
2018 · Jul
Expands its ZappRx partnership into new specialty treatment areas.
2020 · Jan
Wins the eyeforpharma Entrepreneur Award, Health Solution category.
Funding
Modestly capitalized, tightly focused.
PARx is not a blitzscaling story, and that is rather the point. Public records show a small stack of capital - $750K of debt in 2013 and a $4.41M round in 2015 - supporting a company that has stayed around 40 people while serving prescribers nationwide. In an industry addicted to headcount, doing one annoying thing well with a compact team is its own kind of strategy.
$4.41M
2015 round
~40
employees
Distribution & Rivals
Meeting doctors where they already work.
The smartest thing PARx did was not build a better portal - it was refusing to make anyone leave their existing one. By integrating with OptimizeRx (a network of 370+ EHR/eRx providers reaching 500,000+ clinicians) and ZappRx (specialty-drug e-prescribing), PARx put prior authorization inside the software prescribers already stare at all day. Distribution beats features, and embedding beats another login.
It is not alone in the gap. The prior authorization and hub-services space includes larger players like CoverMyMeds and a cluster of automation vendors - DoseSpot, InspireRx, HealthGates and others - all chasing the same friction. PARx's differentiator is the human layer: nurses and reimbursement specialists on the phone, not just an automated form-filler.
Approval rate is a proxy. Access is the goal. The number that matters is whether the patient walks out with the medication.
Field Notes
Five things worth knowing.
$0
Cost to a physician office - because manufacturers, not doctors, sponsor the service.
70%
Of PA denials are administrative, not clinical. The fight is usually over a form, not a diagnosis.
48h
Typical window for a plan decision once PARx submits a request.
15 yrs
CEO Dan Rubin ran Adheris before turning to prior authorization.
~40
People serving prescribers nationwide - small on purpose.
Company details compiled from PARx Solutions' own materials and public sources including Crunchbase, Tracxn, CB Insights, and partner press releases. Financial and statistical figures are approximate and reflect the sources cited; verify current specifics directly with the company.
