Meet VytlAIQ: The AI Edge for Health System Pharmacy

Lesley Pink: Hello and welcome to the Strategic Dose, Driving Your Pharmacy Mission. I’m Lesley Pink, your host. Today we’ll be talking about VytlOne’s new AI product, VytlAIQ. We’ll be chatting with Kim Tzoumakas, the CEO of VytlOne, and Amrit Saxena, the founder and CEO of SaxeCap. Kim has been CEO of VytlOne since January 2025. Amrit founded SaxeCap in 2019. Welcome to the podcast, Kim and Amrit.

Kim Tzoumakas: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Amrit Saxena: Thanks so much for having us.

Lesley Pink: According to a recent study from Sage Growth Partners about healthcare C-suite leaders and AI, healthcare leaders rank AI as the top healthcare trend to watch and are expecting it to have a substantial impact on driving core objectives. I’m sure this is not surprising to either of you, which leads to our discussion today about VytlAIQ. First off, Kim, what is VytlAIQ?

Kim Tzoumakas: VytlAIQ is a proprietary pharmacy intelligence platform we built specifically for health system pharmacies. I want to stress specifically because that matters enormously in this space. There’s a lot of noise and a lot of work products being put out there that are not built with core operators and pharmacists at the front end of it. This is AI layered into an intelligence platform and was built from the ground up with SaxeCap side by side with all of our experienced leaders, specifically focused around 340B compliance and liaison optimization as well as reporting and revenue capture.

Lesley Pink: How did VytlAIQ come about? And you mentioned VytlOne and SaxeCap working together. Can you talk a little bit more about that and why now is the right time to bring a tool like this to market?

Kim Tzoumakas: The why now piece goes back to 20 years of working inside health systems as an attorney. I was in boardrooms where conversations were around not having enough capital to improve outcomes for patients, working through 340B audits and compliance issues where systems failed to comply. And I watched health systems losing millions of dollars, not because they were not doing anything or because they were doing anything wrong, but because programs lack visibility and the speed to stay ahead of an environment that was moving fast.

The 340B program has become dramatically more complex. Manufacturer restrictions, audit exposure, contract pharmacies’ scrutiny, all of which have to be dealt with by those teams while they’re still doing the main job, which is taking care of patients. When I joined VytlOne, we had an incredible operational team. And one thing that was very clear to me was that the depth that we had was unmatched out there in this space.

But there is a need to embrace and encompass AI into what we were doing in the pharmacy space. We have the data, we have the systems, we had a number of disparate programs that we had either built or bought that were doing pieces of this, but we did not have a unified across-the-board platform to be able to execute end to end in the pharmacy. As I went on the journey of identifying how we build this from the ground up last year, having a partner was absolutely critical. We are not AI and technology experts. We’re not a technology company; we’re a pharmacy services company and a pharmacy services partner. When I met Amrit, the CEO of SaxeCap, I knew right then that this was the partner that we needed. The depth and expertise as well as the understanding of healthcare was unmatched by any of their competitors out there. So, from my perspective, it’s been a perfect partnership although it took a lot more time to get this built than I as a CEO would prefer.

I’m glad it did because we did it the right way. We did it all encompassing and we did it with the right partner. I’d love to hear your thoughts on partnering with VytlOne.

Amrit Saxena: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much, Kim, and thanks again for having me. And it has been a true delight for SaxeCap to partner with VytlOne on this incredibly important initiative. Some background on SaxeCap. I started SaxeCap about eight years ago to partner with private equity funds and their portfolio companies to really fundamentally transform how they do business with AI. And you know, we’ve had the great luxury of partnering with70+ private equity funds, hundreds of companies along the way.

But few initiatives have been as important as VytlAIQ and our deep and growing partnership with VytlOne. When you think about why the time was ripe for real AI innovation in the context of pharmacy services, one of the big things that attracted us to working closely with Kim and her team is that the underlying AI capabilities have gotten so much better over the past few years that you finally are able to wrangle through the complexity of pharmacy data, everything from claims, clinical notes, eligibility rules, paradynamics, all things that were previously unstructured or semi-structured. And you can go and drive tremendous structure and value with the latest and greatest large language models. Of course, as Kim had alluded to, the 340B environment keeps getting more complex with tighter compliance scrutiny and more regulatory overhang. And health systems are trying to navigate this. And we thought that given where the technology is and the complexity of where the industry is going, the time was perfect to really bring a transformative new AI-driven operating system to market that can go improve not only just the operations and performance of our partners and their teams, but ultimately materially improve outcomes for the patients that they serve.

Lesley Pink: And there’s some skepticism in healthcare about what AI promises versus reality. What would you say to a health system leader who was skeptical?

Kim Tzoumakas: You absolutely should be skeptical. Healthy skepticism, whenever anything is new and moving as fast as AI is moving, I think it’s important. I’ve spent two decades watching different kinds of vendors, different kinds of technology come in and out of health systems and the promises that are made were very rarely actually realized. When a health system leader pushes back on AI, that plays to the advantage of a company like VytlOne because of the 100-year history we have in specialty pharmacy, the 30-year history we have in managing pharmacies, and the fact that we built this with that expertise as opposed to just being built by a technology firm that is trying to grab quick market share.

There are so many different platforms and other AI products being thrown at CEOs that it is often difficult to differentiate between the ones that are going to be here forever and that are built with the right foundation and the ones that are here for a quick win. And then you’re going to be unraveling everything you had before.

When you’re dealing with health systems, it’s even more complex because you’ve got patient data and other considerations of privacy and similar requirements that you have to factor in. If you don’t have a team of healthcare compliance experts, companies run by healthcare attorneys, AKA me, then you have a high risk of some of that getting missed. From my perspective, it’s one of the things that I think is going to differentiate us for sure.

Amrit Saxena: Yeah, I definitely echo everything that Kim said and totally agree that the skepticism is healthy and it’s absolutely earned by the industry. For decades, we’ve had software companies pitching AI capabilities, which often were thin wrappers or in many cases just simple if-then statements being marketed as AI. So I think there is certainly quite a bit of skepticism, and I think some folks just feeling as if they’ve been burned out by the constant AI narrative.

And what I would say as a deep AI technologist and innovator, don’t assess us on the AI narrative. Assess us on the outcomes that we help you drive. Look at the 340B claims that we’re auditing at 100% coverage versus the sampling techniques that people have to use today because they don’t have time. Look at where your revenue capture rate goes to upon deployment of technologies like early line intelligence platform or agentic referral management optimization tooling. And that is really what matters at the end of the day. AI is simply a substrate to help deliver these outcomes for you, which we’re very excited to bring to bear for the broader market and community.

Lesley Pink: You mentioned some of the things that VytlAIQ can do. And can you talk more about what a health systems workday would look like before VytlAIQ implementation and after?

Kim Tzoumakas: We have years of experience in managing hospital and health system pharmacies, have teams that sit in those pharmacies doing that work, and we had a number of different tools that were filling various components of what their job is. Those various tools did not work together, and they resulted in significant leakage, capture rates that are below what they can be, human error.

One of the things that I think I’m most impressed with is the removal of human error and the supportive AI tools that are making not only their job faster and easier, but also fixing things that wouldn’t normally catch the attention of someone that often results in denials or in capture gaps. This is going to be a differentiator in many of our existing clients. We believe it’ll be an opportunity for new clients of ours to really have a long-term sustainable solution that is end to end, covers all aspects of pharmacy operations and capture as well as 100% compliance. Also, the advantage of being built by pharmacy experts.

As the rules continue to get more complex, manufacturer restrictions, all of that is being baked into this to be able to continue to make real-time updates to where even five years from now it is still the best in class that’s out there.

The other thing that I would say is this is not a product or a platform that is going to replace the pharmacists or the liaisons or the compliance team within organizations. What it will do is let them use that expertise for much more strategic things to deliver better outcomes, for ensuring that patients are on their medications and continue to stay on their medications and allows this in the background to do the work that they were doing before something like this was available.

Amrit Saxena: Yeah, Kim captured the operational side of this really well. Let me maybe paint the picture on the systems and architecture side to really help showcase why the difference is as transformative as it is. Before VytlAIQ, the data pharmacy team needed to do its job, lived in half a dozen or more different disparate data systems. The EHR, the pharmacy management system, the 340B splits billing software, payer feeds.

And of course, dozens of homegrown spreadsheets to actually do your work. Those systems weren’t designed to talk to one another and so you basically had very valuable team members, pharmacists, pharmacy liaisons, effectively serving as that integration layer, going between all these different systems, these different spreadsheets, so on and so forth. Folks spent countless hours pulling reports, reconciling things by hand, and working off of data that was often a few days or even weeks old and then after doing all of that hard work, you only find out about a compliance issue or a gap in your captured revenue well after the fact. Everything’s reactive and very manual.

With the deployment of VytlAIQ, all of that data is consolidated into one real-time dynamic AI-driven engine. The 340B audit is running continuously in the background, so it’s not something that you have to worry about. Every claim is being assessed, and risks surface at the moment that they exist, not after the fact. Pharmacy liaisons start their day with a prioritized view on exactly the most important actions to take, which patients to engage, which referrals are at risk of leaking, what needs your attention, so on and so forth. And those manual workflows that used to take hours and sometimes even longer, they get cut down to minutes or seconds. And there are many things that can be fully handled agentically through our AI platforms and so really the idea is taking all this disparate data, building it into a foundation, and then operationalizing first predictive intelligence with machine learning and then a genetic intelligence with gen AI to really supercharge your operations day to day in your pharmacies.

Lesley Pink: What does success look like for a health system 12 months after the implementation of VytlAIQ? What can pharmacy leaders expect to see?

Kim Tzoumakas: Twelve months in, our goal is that everyone within a pharmacy is using this intelligence platform and can say with confidence that their 340B program is performing at a level that they couldn’t achieve manually. Capture rates are up, exposure and financial uncertainty is down, and they have the documentation that would hold up in any review.

As we move into other more complex regulatory changes that everyone knows is coming, we will continue to provide real-time updates to this for our clients, which will allow them to stay ahead of these changes and not have to manually find solutions to the satisfaction of the teams and the ability for them to focus their time and attention on more intriguing and more exciting opportunities as well as more direct patient support and work. Both of those will be critical going forward.

On the financial side, importantly,  CFOs will be able to quantify a significant return on this and the way that they’re going to do that is by all of the various increased capture, reduced denials, and better intelligence around what the cost of drugs are and how they are impacting what reimbursement is.

Amrit Saxena: Yeah, and in addition to that, what’s really interesting about an AI-driven platform is that VytlAIQ will learn on an ongoing basis from all of the operational signals that it gleans—every claim audited, every next best action recommended, every outcome observed. And so, what you’ll start to see, and certainly 12 months after implementation, is that the system gets sharper, more precise to your specific operational model and gets smarter and smarter over time. So you should expect to see the AI-driven features to compound and drive more value for you over time, not less. And ultimately, as we’d alluded to earlier, the success fundamentally looks like one, driving better outcomes for your patients. Two, driving better operational and financial outcomes for your business, which you will see day in and day out through the modules that we’ve deployed for you.

Lesley Pink: What if you’re not a large health system? Does a tool this robust work for smaller hospitals and community health systems?

Kim Tzoumakas: Yeah, I love answering this question. VytlOne, as I mentioned at the beginning, was built on a foundation of many years of managing specialty pharmacies, building them from the ground up, staffing them with our teams. And we continue to do that as a core part of our business and a core part of our offerings. Many of these hospitals and FQHCs don’t have the bandwidth or the expertise to be able to build and operate a specialty pharmacy and then to make sure that they’re driving real performance out of it. And so, we’ve been able to go in and do this. The returns for our clients have been significant.

Our teams are most excited about the fact that they now have VytlAIQ as part of that full-service model. And so, the liaisons that were doing things more manually or with disparate technology that are employed by us but are placed in these various hospitals and FQHCs now have this as an added component of what they’re doing today. They put in a lot of the sweat equity into helping to get this built and get it built right. They did that on top of their day jobs. And so, they are most passionate about the excitement around what this is doing for their day-to-day work within those organizations.

Amrit Saxena : Yeah, and in many ways, smaller systems benefit substantially from a platform like this because they may not have the headcount and analytical horsepower to throw many of the problems that VytlAIQ solves for you autonomously. And more broadly, the way that we’ve designed.

VytlAIQ is a combination of dozens of different AI features, agents, so on and so forth. And it’s all built to be very modular. So as a smaller partner, you don’t have to sign up for everything all at once. You know, a community hospital or an FQHC could potentially start with a 340B optimization module and then layer on the AI-driven client insights portal, potentially then layer on the liaison intelligence platform, so on and so forth to really make sure that the system is working how they would like, that it’s driving value for them, and that they can incrementally keep adding more and more value creation for themselves and their communities.

Lesley Pink: Great. Well, thank you so much, Kim and Amrit, for joining us for the May episode of The Strategic Dose. Please join us for the next podcast in June and remember that you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Amrit Saxena: Thank you so much for having us.