Fighting for Healthcare Equity: Eliza Sternlicht ’15

From an early age, Eliza Sternlicht saw a career in medicine as a way of using her talents to help others. However, as she got older, she also became increasingly aware of the inequities in the healthcare field, particularly around the cost and accessibility of treatments. Eliza was dismayed to discover that one of her best friends, with a below-the-knee amputation, couldn’t afford a prosthetic. When he was growing so quickly, he couldn’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on a prosthetic when he would need another one the next year. “It seemed incredible to me that with the technological advancements we have seen in recent years, something as indispensable as a limb would not be available to everyone,” she recalls.

 

This realization inspired Eliza to learn more about 3D-printed prosthetics, and she spearheaded a project at Kimball Union to use the school’s 3D printers to create prosthetic hands for children. In so doing, she also discovered a passion for biomedical engineering. “I like the mindset of identifying a problem and creating solutions, and biomedical engineering is all about applying theory and solving problems.”

 

The next problem that Eliza identified inspired her to create a company. During her sophomore year at Brown University, Eliza surveyed hospitals and medical facilities to identify unmet needs and realized there was a massive issue with medication waste. In facilities with limited resources, once a prepackaged medication tray was opened in the operating room, everything had to be discarded, even if unused, because the contents were no longer sterile. The scale of waste seemed incredible, and Eliza and her classmate Jack Schaeffer started researching the issue, talking to hospitals, pharmacies, and nursing homes. “They would show us biomedical waste bins filled to the brim with partially used prescriptions.” At the same time, Eliza was meeting nursing home patients who couldn’t afford to fill their prescriptions. “To this day, Jack and I are still haunted by a visit to a nursing home where we saw a patient cutting her pill in half with a kitchen knife because she needed to extend her prescription.” The idea for MediCircle, a company that would collect and redistribute unused medications to patients for whom cost is a barrier to treatment, started to take form.

 

Eliza and Jack founded MediCircle while still at Brown, taking the roles of COO and CEO, respectively. They decided to focus their work on cancer and specialty medications, where the medical need is critical and the price point of the drugs is unaffordable for so many. In the United States, $5.94 billion worth of viable cancer medication is wasted every year, and 63% of cancer patients identify cost as a barrier to treatment. Eliza helped pass the legislation in Rhode Island to allow medication recertification while still at Brown. The process is now legal in 43 states. Eliza also had a role in amending the regulations in Texas, where the company set up operations due to the sizeable uninsured patient demographic and the extensive medical facilities in Houston, Austin, and Dallas. “When you’re building a startup, you want to do something you can get off the ground quickly,” explains Eliza. “It made sense to start in Texas.”

 

MediCircle submits all the medication it collects to its patented recertification process. This process includes tracking the medication history, visual inspection to verify product identifiers, ensuring that there has been no tampering, and chemical analysis on a sample size of medication to ensure its quality and potency. Then, the company redistributes the medicine to patients through its pharmacy for no more than $20 a month to uninsured patients, underinsured patients, or those who fall under 400% of the federal poverty line. MediCircle recently passed $1M in medication recertified.

 

Scaling and expanding MediCircle still offers Eliza plenty of fodder for her creative problem-solving skills. One of her current challenges is developing new ideas for incentivizing people to donate their unused medication. To date, many of the donations have been based on goodwill. “It’s like giving blood,” says Eliza. “People are really motivated to help others, and they know the value of these medications and don’t want to see them go to waste.” Eliza is also talking to patients and brainstorming other inducements that might make donating unused oncology medication appealing, such as contributing to a charity of the donor’s choice or membership in a community. “We want to figure out what drives people to make that decision [to donate]... even though our process is really easy, they have to be willing to take that leap.”