The 2016 MedTech Boston 40 Under 40 Healthcare Innovators

Zoë Barry
Founder & CEO at ZappRx
Zoë Barry isn’t your typical healthcare entrepreneur. Her career trajectory has been fascinatingly untraditional; her resume includes a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Columbia, a summer saving bald eagles with veterinarians in Alaska, working in a neuroscience primate research lab at Harvard Medical School, and two separate stints on Wall Street.

Ultimately she gave in to what she describes as a “longstanding flirtation” with healthcare. At 27 Barry conceived of the idea for ZappRx, a cloud-based platform that streamlines prescribing specialty medications and increases speed-to-therapy for the patients that rely on them.

The idea for ZappRx was born from Barry’s personal experience with the inefficiencies of prescription workflow. When her youngest brother was diagnosed with severe epilepsy, it took months to get him on the therapy that he needed. “He wound up developing a stutter, brain damage, and short term memory loss,” she remembers. “Once he got on medication, it all stopped.”

To date ZappRx has fundraised over $7 million. With that said, the road to success has not been without its challenges. “Being a startup in the healthcare space is not for the faint of heart, because you do have to meet so many rules and regulations, ” explains Barry. “It’s not like the tech industry where you can throw an alpha or a beta out there and people can use it, it can break, and you can get feedback on it. In healthcare you pretty much have to build a complete product before you can put it out into the marketplace.”

You can read more about Barry and ZappRx here.