Riparian
Powering Healthcare with Analytics

In nature, the riparian zone is the interface between the river and the land that helps create an efficient ecosystem by reducing turbidity and controlling the speed of the river. Inspired by nature, Pasadena-based Riparian seeks to create a healthy ecosystem for its clients within the government pricing world by becoming the interface between its clients, technology, and the government. “We help provide clarity on regulations and control the flow of information while providing clear solutions to our clients,” says David Chan, CEO of Riparian.

Riparian was created to address the market with user-friendly enterprise solutions based on their clients’ requirements, which can solve their most crucial business challenges. The Riparian team, being users themselves, are aware of the challenges of doing government pricing submissions or rebate adjudication, which helps them create solutions that improve user adoption. Chan also puts into practice his 18 years of knowledge in the consulting industry to better understand the customers’ issues. “Our management consulting practice and business process outsourcing are some of the best in our field and that experience drives insights into our product development,” says Chan.

Riparian mainly works with pharmaceutical and biologics manufacturers in the life sciences industry as Chan notes that there are currently major gaps in their revenue management systems (In the pharmaceutical space, the term coined for rebate adjudication for Medicaid and commercial rebates and the government pricing application is “revenue management”). The Riparian team knows the industry very well and therefore works on solutions to bridge those gaps such as allowing business owners to manage their government pricing methodologies without needing to involve IT with tedious updates.

When implementing their solution, the company goes through the phases of discovery, planning, define, design, configuration/test, and finally the production phase. The discovery or planning phase is when Riparian performs several workshops to figure out the customer’s requirements for the solution.

We help control the flow of information while providing clear solutions to our clients

The define/design phase has an overlap wherein the company tries to figure out if a customization, a configuration, or some data manipulation needs to be done to make sure the implementation goes smoothly. After configuring the system, Riparian does functional parallel testing, user acceptance testing, and training for the final result, which allows them to go into production. What follows is an optional hypercare period where Riparian provides various tiers of support to make sure that everything runs in accordance with their client’s expectation when it goes live. From an integration perspective, Riparian partners with the manufacturer, both on the technology side and the business side, which helps the company move ahead of its competitors.

In tune with the industry’s move toward a SaaS solution, Riparian is creating a subscription-based government pricing application hosted on AWS that clients can log into. Previous applications had a majority of the methodology information hard-coded into the system and were not flexible for the business. To address all of the clients’ needs in one application, the company built an end-to-end solution comprising of various modules including data validation, reconciliation, methodology builder, calculation results with business intelligence, and more. It also consists of work flow and a reporting module that allows manufacturers to document their certifications. “One of our key ideas in creating the solution was to remove the inefficiency of having to go outside of the system,” says Chan. The company has just started demonstrating the product to various clients and has received tremendous reception and strong interest with many of the top manufacturers.

With the mission to enable clients to anticipate and address their most complex business challenges with efficiency, clarity, and accelerated insights, Riparian always works in accordance with its core values: principled, passionate and relentless.