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I’d always wanted to be a physician. I enrolled in medical school at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai after studying public health & philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Usually, in the summer between the first and second year of med school, you do an academic or clinical research project. When it came time for me to choose, I was instead drawn - and was fortunate to have Mt. Sinai’s OK - to work for a venture fund. I had long been interested in entrepreneurship, and as medical school continued, that interest grew stronger. I saw how, with clinical medicine, I was impacting one patient at a time, whereas with entrepreneurship, I could use technology to impact many lives at once.
The fund I worked for that summer was an impact fund focused on very early-stage companies. I reviewed dozens of pitches per week, but the ones that fascinated me were from the worlds of consumer packaged goods (“CPG”) and consumer tech. Many of these products and technologies were used by millions of people. What stuck out most was the caliber of their talent in marketing and branding; their work was unlike anything I’d seen in the life sciences field, including any of the technology I was exposed to as a doctor-in-training.
By the time I left the fund, I was thinking twice as much about venture ideas as I was about my med school coursework. Chase and I were classmates and friends already at Mount Sinai; he shared my entrepreneurial bent, having already been a successful founder at Parsable. We started having long conversations to sharpen our thinking. It was completely absorbing for me. I remember one phone call with Chase where I was walking and talking, and by the time I pulled my attention away enough to figure out where I was, I realized I’d walked 50 blocks from campus!
Well, I think the absorption factor I just spoke to was sort of an “aha” of its own, although realizing that fact was a bit gradual. But there is also a moment from my time at the venture fund that stands out as well. I was reviewing the market for prescription depression drugs and came across a brand I knew (from pitch docs) that was spending $10M annually on marketing. That $10M was being used to drive user traffic to a webpage that looked like it might’ve been made from not much more than a single photo. There was a photo of their pill bottle, a hand holding an Rx pad, a couple of colored stripes across the top corner, and a few vaguely phrased “ask your doctor about [brand]” calls to action. It floored me. How could that much capital be directed toward what seemed like a digital dead end? The page was static; it didn’t guide or engage me. What I saw instead was a lot of money being wasted and maybe an ample opportunity as well.
Well, yeah. I left medical school after my second year and co-founded what is now Ostro with Chase. Leaving the safety and security of the med school path to work full-time at a start-up – and we had nothing, no customers, and no financing at first – was easily the scariest decision I’ve made so far in my life. But it’s turning out to be one of the best. At the time my dad bet on it being a round trip – “you’ll leave, go learn a lot, and then go back to medical school” – and I know we’re both happy he was only half right.
As we started to launch and commercialize our first product we called the company RxDefine. Though after we really understood the scope of our market – how our products were generating interest not just from therapeutic companies but from device and diagnostic and other life science companies as well – we realized that the RxDefine name was too narrow.
Companies and founders always talk about “product-market fit,” but we also wanted to have “brand-market fit.” Through a very extensive renaming and brand creation process led by a former creative designer at Apple, we decided to change our name to Ostro. It’s technically the name of a warm, gentle wind that blows across the Mediterranean. And we loved it on the spot because it’s how we wanted the clinicians and consumers we support to feel: not compelled, not forced – rather, guided gently and warmly to the next step in their healthcare journey.
Candidly, it’s also what we’re trying to do with pharma companies: we’re trying, gently and warmly as well, to guide them to a more modernized, consumer-friendly approach to commercialization and engagement. We believe this is ultimately something that we can do at Ostro to really move the needle in terms of improving the healthcare experience, and ultimately improving health outcomes.
One of our mottos at Ostro is to “cut the clicks.” Patients and doctors alike have far too many barriers to receiving and delivering the care they want, and a major one of those barriers is how difficult it is to find information and take action online. There are just too many clicks. So we spend a lot of time thinking about that user experience, including how it is different for our different users.
We look, too, at aesthetics. For example, early on, as we were building Ostro, I was especially inspired by how engaging and beautiful some of the telemedicine leaders’ sites were. Sites like Ro (formerly Roman) and Hims (now Hims & Hers). We also took inspiration from leading companies outside the healthcare space, like Netflix, Google and Apple. I think aesthetics are important, but they’ll also always be a distinct second place behind user experience from a design perspective.
For our physicians, an Ostro-enabled site can give back valuable time and mental energy when researching and arriving at a diagnosis or prescribing decision. And for consumers, a better and more engaging experience can more quickly illuminate what might be wrong, and what therapy might help; and sometimes that’s the difference between somebody seeking out treatment versus just getting frustrated and giving up.
There’s a lot that healthcare and life sciences can still learn and adopt from other industries, and that’s an area where we also think we can deliver value. We are not shy at all about investigating what is working in fields like consumer tech, and CPG are bringing that right away into the life sciences space. But we also know very well that the context is different – these are different products with vastly different regulatory and compliance considerations – and we take that into account from the outset to ensure that we are building products that delight our users and our customers but that also can be used and implemented in a compliant fashion.
There are a lot of different perspectives and context that we’re considering and adapting here at Ostro. And our team reflects that diversity. We have product and engineering talent and advisors from consumer heavyweights like Amazon, Google, YouTube, Hims & Hers, Noom, Robinhood, and more. We also have a team with deep experience serving life sciences companies, from places like Real Chemistry, Doximity, Klick, and more. And we’ve invested heavily in compliance as well – we brought senior regulatory and legal advisors in-house experts much earlier than most small companies. Attracting the right team, and the right investors to help us grow, has enabled us to create a suite of complementary solutions that not only comply with stringent regulations that govern the life sciences sector, but that also deliver a superior user experience – something that consumers and clinicians (who are of course consumers in their own right) now expect when navigating online.
We know that the leaders in life sciences – the companies that we serve – are doing the hard work of creating lifesaving therapeutics and building world-class R&D organizations. These companies spend so much in terms of time and resources to bring these therapies out into the world, and so it can be incredibly frustrating to the brands – and to the patients and providers they want to serve – when there are solvable problems that get in the way of these therapies delivering real results.
At Ostro, we don’t make new medicines, but we like to say that our talent is making medicine make sense. These companies – our customers – want to get all of these life-improving products into the hands of patients and providers, and that is something that we want too, and that we can help with. Our products let them confidently remove some of the most common and solvable roadblocks to awareness and adoption by both consumers and clinicians, and we’ve seen tremendous excitement from our customers about that.
For our customers, we work across all stages of life science commercialization, from pre-launch through end-of-life cycle products. For some, our work begins before the PDUFA date, while for others, it augments an outdated brand.com experience.
And when it comes to indications? We work across oncology, rare disease, rheumatology, pulmonology, gastroenterology, neurology, psychiatry, dermatology, women’s health, nephrology, cardiology, and more.
Well, this is the most exciting part for me, obviously – when we can see the real impact that Ostro is having on our brands and on the patients and providers that we support together.
One macro insight our data has shown is that a better patient experience can achieve the same outcome for a brand as tinkering with top-of-funnel audience targeting. This suggests that a brand doesn’t necessarily have to spend more money on media and marketing in order to expand its market; developing a more engaging and efficient experience for users can have the same – or greater - effect.
For instance, one rare disease brand we work with received ~30,000 visitors per month to its site. However, only 150 of those were completing the intended consumer flow. This stark abandonment rate indicated a significant issue with user experience and engagement. So we talked internally, and with our customer, and we asked: “Is it possible that the right audience is being reached, but the experience isn't intuitive enough to drive action?” When we brought Ostro into the picture at this brand, we saw improvements from 2x to as much as 17x across a range of the high-value actions the brand was interested in, and overall increases of 150% and 40% for CTA starts and completion, respectively.
And it’s not only about the raw data – we also think a lot about the personal side of healthcare, and we believe as a company that empathy matters. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s also a smart business strategy for brands. For example, our Navigate solution has powerfully shown how the inclusion of live nurse navigators can improve engagement with consumers. We found that Ostro nurse navigators were able to turn 97% of calls which started off as negative interactions into positive interactions by the end of the exchange, whether it was via live chat or phone. So even as we see this rise of automation and AI across the web, I like that we have a demonstrated way to maintain human-to-human interaction, to create an empathetic connection for those users and brands who want it, and that we can tell that this delivers real results.
I’m excited by the potential of continuing to build on our expertise and experience with cutting-edge AI to truly revolutionize how we support patients and healthcare professionals. By harnessing advanced models to intuitively assess online behavior and understand intent, we can deliver precisely the right resource—whether it's a copay card, patient brochure, or a critical safety study—at the exact moment it's needed. This is about more than just technology; it's about reimagining the healthcare experience to eliminate friction and empower meaningful, timely interactions. We’ve been relentlessly focused on bringing this vision to life, and I’m excited to have it in the hands of our customers by year’s end.
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