The hallmark of successful brands is consistency. Consumers keep coming back to Advil, for instance, because its effects are known and trusted.
Products in the fledgling medical marijuana industry don’t enjoy that kind of certainty. But scientists at Werc Shop in Pasadena have made it their business to help marijuana cultivators, dispensaries and patients ensure the plants they’re producing, selling and consuming provide the expected effects consistently.
Chief Executive Jeffrey Raber explained that a patient might buy a particular strain at a dispensary and really like how it eased pain or helped with sleep. But the next time the patient buys the same strain, the plant might not have the same genetic makeup and could affect the patient differently.
“We can analyze it and say this is just like the last harvest,” said Raber, who has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. “You can start to rely on it if you’re a patient looking for medicinal effects.”
Raber, 39, had worked in drug development and discovery and chemical manufacturing before co-founding Werc Shop with his brother Mark in 2010.
“We use the same types of tools a pharmaceutical company would use to look at as many of the molecules as we can,” said Jeffrey Raber, who recently opened a second lab, in Bellevue, Wash., which has been certified to test marijuana for that state’s medicinal and recreational markets.
Job orders range from $50 to as much as a few thousand dollars depending on the number of varieties of samples and tests being performed, and it takes two to four days to do a whole panel.
The business is geographically challenging because it’s illegal to ship samples to the lab. Thus, Raber and company end up making a lot of house calls for pickups.
“We go to Bakersfield, Palm Springs; we’ve even done special trips up to the Bay Area,” Raber said.
Werc has a few other competitors in the area, but Raber isn’t worried about a deluge of new labs entering the market, saying it’s a highly skilled specialization with a high barrier to entry. He said Werc is at an intersection between things moving from illicit markets to fully regulated legal markets.
“There’s been a lack of formal supply chain and standardization,” he said. “There’s an enormous opportunity to create a new paradigm shift and what a pharmaceutical company might look like.”
Untangling Web
UCLA’s health system was swimming in a tangle of 64 different software applications and none of them could communicate with each other.
One program recorded patient data from doctors’ notes, another would have data from MRIs and body scans, and a different one handled billing – all for the same patient.
“There was a lot of disparity,” said Jose Garcia, UCLA Medical Center’s manager for enterprise storage and backup. “Cumbersome is putting it mildly. For the day and age we’re in where everything is moving at the speed of media, we weren’t there.”
To streamline operations, UCLA recently replaced dozens of software applications with one humbly named system called Epic. While such an overhaul normally happens in phases over a couple of years, the university enlisted help from Key Information Systems Inc. in Agoura Hills and deployed the “beast of a software” in six months, Garcia said.
“It put everything together under one pane of glass,” he said. “We log in and it tells us everything about our patient, and patients look at the same readings we look at.”
Garcia said the change has saved almost $12 million just by compressing server storage space. The health system can also grow a lot faster now without having to renovate infrastructure.
And even though the Affordable Care Act has been incentivizing medical providers to update their electronic records, Garcia said UCLA took on the massive project simply to benefit patients.
“The requirements from the ACA was an extra carrot, a bonus,” he said.
We’re in the Medicaid
In the movie “The Graduate,” the character Mr. McGuire famously counseled the young protagonist with one word of advice: “plastics.” If the film were shot today, that advice could easily have been “Medicaid.”
Long Beach’s Molina Healthcare Inc., which operates clinics and offers health plans for Medicaid-eligible patients, announced last week that it saw $9.7 billion in revenue in 2014, up 47 percent over the previous year. Its stock hit an all-time high of $58.38 on the news.
In a statement, Dr. J. Mario Molina, the company’s chief executive, called 2014 a year of great growth and accomplishment. The company added almost 700,000 members to its health plans.
Molina Healthcare’s growing membership was buoyed by Medicaid’s expansion under the Affordable Care Act.
Still, the Medicaid windfall did not assure entirely smooth sailing. The company was affected last year by delays in reimbursements by some states of a new fee levied on health insurers.
“While the overall results fell short of our expectations due to factors outside of our control, such as the reimbursement of the Affordable Care Act’s Health Insurer Fee, we enter 2015 better prepared to meet many of the challenges ahead of us,” Molina said.
Staff reporter Marni Usheroff can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 229.
