MBN USA

June 25, 2021

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Startup CourMed® innovating with the right medicine

Delivering the goods

By M.V. Greene

By now, it seems that just about everybody has heard of or used a ride platform that ferries people or brings food — like Uber and Lyft for ride-hailing or Uber Eats, Postmates, Door Dash and Grubhub for food. It is a spiraling market segment that, according to SpotnRides, is to leapfrog to $220 billion by 2025 from around $61 billion in 2018.

Enter a Dallas, Texas-based startup called CourMed® and its founder and CEO Derrick L. Miles, whose twist on the crowdsourcing delivery business model couldn’t be more precise.

Like the ride companies, CourMed employs the same highly intuitive enterprise software to facilitate innovative delivery. Only with CourMed, the innovation is the delivery of health care products.

“We use similar technology to make the deliveries from point A to B. What makes us different is that we don’t deliver people, and we don’t deliver food,” Miles said. “We decided to focus on health care product delivery only.”

Working with community pharmacies, medical distribution companies, physician groups, hospitals and directly with consumers, CourMed provides concierge delivery to homes and offices of just about anything with a medical bent — prescriptions, high-end vitamins, over-the-counter supplements, natural remedies, eyewear, patient specimens, immuno-nutrition drinks and personal protective equipment. And in a world overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic, CourMed will even deliver and administer life-saving vaccines.

“Anything from a health care perspective that you used to leave your house for, we are actually bringing it to you now,” Miles said.

He is an entrepreneur and inventor with big ideas and a burning desire to scale. Miles jumpstarted his career in health care with a degree in medical technology from Bethune-Cookman University before buttressing that foundation with advanced degrees from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and certificates from the University of Michigan and Stanford University.

Driving innovation in the health care delivery space has become embedded in Miles’ personal and business DNA. At 31, he was an interim CEO at a Texas hospital, and he has worked in key roles as a hospital executive in operations and logistics, which provided the road map for striking out on his own.

“I realized that health care was not the most innovative space to come up with ideas to improve the lives of others but improving the lives of others is what it is all about,” he said.

Being “bum-rushed”

CourMed launched in November 2018 at the Irving, Texas, headquarters of a mighty benefactor, Vizient Inc., a health care group purchaser that provides solutions and services to improve the delivery of high-value care. That spark led the company to other high-level engagements, including a 2019 invitation to the highly regarded ideaShare, an independent pharmacy conference put on by McKesson Corp., a global behemoth in health care supply-chain solutions.

Miles said CourMed was the only delivery platform to be invited. And, he recalled being “bum-rushed” with attention after a McKesson executive mentioned the company from the stage.

“We got on their radar, and everybody was asking about CourMed,” Miles said.

So far, CourMed is operating its delivery platform through McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health’s pharmacy networks. But Miles is reaching for more and believes he knows what it will take to get there. While delivery remains core to the company, he sees CourMed morphing into something greater through an all-consuming concierge health care experience that includes health care services that can be administered in the comfort of your living room and enterprise software for hospitals and other health care providers that allow them to own the patient experience end-to-end.

“We consider ourselves to be a health care solutions company. We can still do the delivery, but we can bring new revenue and higher-margin services. Those are two impactful aspects of CourMed today,” he said.

Investments from trillion-dollar behemoths

Expanding beyond delivery was embraced by Microsoft Corp., which asked him to join its Microsoft for Startups program that is designed to help emerging companies build scale and revenues. CourMed graduated from the Microsoft for Startups program earlier this year and is now an official Microsoft Partner.

Recently, CourMed was named the first company to receive access to capital from Microsoft’s $50 million Partner Growth Initiative. In 2020, CourMed also received funding through the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund, an initiative that provides cash awards between $50,000 and $100,000 for U.S. startups led by African American owners as part of its commitment to racial equity.

“Three out of four companies with a trillion-dollar market cap have provided access to capital, piloting opportunities and suggestions for new verticals for CourMed,” Miles said. “Google started as a search engine, and Microsoft started as office productivity software. Both companies are much more today. CourMed started as a prescription delivery service, but we are much more today.”

To learn more about CourMed, visit courmed.com.