In early 2020, Leslie Asanga was working part-time as a pharmacist in New Haven while attending the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH).
The COVID-19 pandemic had just started, and Asanga noticed a troubling trend: Amid city and state lockdowns, people were struggling to pick up their medications.
"When the pandemic hit, I saw an increase in prescription abandonment, especially among seniors," he said.
Sure, this was a real problem for the pharmacy and the people it served. But Asanga '20 M.P.H also saw it as an important opportunity. He couldn't stop thinking about how to get people their medications safely. He wondered if it would be possible to recruit young and healthy local residents to volunteer to deliver medications to more vulnerable populations like older adults and immunocompromised people.
Asanga soon discovered the answer was "yes." In March 2020, he started recruiting Yale students and faculty members for prescription deliveries. Within three days, 50 volunteers signed up.
"I was so inspired by the way people really just wanted to help," he said.
That's how the idea for Asanga's app Pills2Me was born. Like Uber but for prescription deliveries, it is a health technology company that increases medication adherence via on-demand prescription delivery from any pharmacy.
Today, Pills2Me is available in 18 cities across seven states. It has 13 full-time employees, and it's already made more than one million prescription deliveries. Headquartered in Las Vegas, the startup also employs thousands of independent contractors - also known as "caregivers" - who deliver the prescriptions. In Nevada alone, the company now works with 500-plus caregivers across the state.
From pharmacy to public health
Asanga graduated from pharmacy school in 2017. After working as a pharmacist for two years, however, he realized it wasn't the best fit.
"I really liked the job. I like interacting with people and meeting people," he said. "But I felt trapped in the sense that I could impact way more lives than what I was doing."
Asanga kept asking how he could be more impactful in the health care space. As he explored different options, he felt drawn to public health - and the idea of effecting change at a population level.
That's what ultimately led Asanga to Yale in 2019. When he started a graduate program at YSPH, he decided to focus specifically on issues at the intersection of public health and entrepreneurship. He was excited by the possibility of identifying problems and deploying solutions - especially in a scalable way.
While at Yale, he took advantage of the university's many entrepreneurial offerings, including an entrepreneurship for social change class and the Student Innovation Lab at Yale School of Management (SOM). He also collaborated with the Yale Institute for Global Health's Sustainable Health Initiative, one of the first public health innovation and social entrepreneurship programs led by a school of public health.
For Asanga, solving problems was always second nature: "When you can measure and see the impact over time, it's inspiring and encouraging."
It was at a CVS in New Haven, where he was working part-time as a pharmacist in the early days of COVID-19, that he identified a public health problem that needed to be fixed - the increase in prescription abandonments.
And he soon devised a solution.
First, Asanga recruited a friend to build a simple website form where people could sign up for prescription deliveries. Once a request was received, Asanga would then go through a list of volunteers and dispatch the first person available to pick up and deliver the client's medication.
Around the same time, Asanga started digging further into prescription abandonment - which predated the pandemic - and learned the scope of the problem. In 2019, for example, the prescription abandonment rate was about 30%, and up to 50% with electronic prescriptions.
But he started to see that it wasn't just about the prescriptions themselves. There were also downstream effects, like more people ending up in the emergency department because they weren't taking essential medications.
An app for that
In the weeks after the lockdown was put in place, Asanga and his volunteers continued to fulfill prescription delivery requests for people cross New Haven. Requests for delivery services poured in, and it wasn't just from older adults or immunocompromised individuals. Some even offered to pay. As more people expressed interest in the service, Asanga saw a need to automate the process.
"We needed an app where people could just place their order easily with a click of a button and then instantly get connected with someone to pick up and deliver [their medication] for them," he said.
Luckily for him, Startup Yale was right around the corner. The annual event convenes promising student entrepreneurs, industry leaders, and investors for a series of pitch competitions, workshops, and discussions. Each year, dozens of student entrepreneurs present innovative ideas to address a range of global challenges, competing for eight prizes totaling more than $200,000 in prizes.
That April, Asanga pitch his app, which he was calling Pills2Me. He ended up receiving the Thorne Prize, which came with a $25,000 award.
"My grandma would say this whole journey was ordained," he said. "When we started, we just wanted to help, and then great things just started happening. The pieces started coming into place."
With the seed funding, Asanga started building out an early version of the app. He was able to leverage talent and expertise across the university, from Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science interns who helped to build the app to Yale SOM friends who joined him in brainstorming business models.
"There's this interconnectedness on campus where it creates this ecosystem you're able to tap into for resources," he said.
At the time, the prescription delivery service was free for older adults and immunocompromised people. But Pills2Me started charging a delivery fee for other populations. Asanga also started looking into background check software to use with delivery drivers, who were now moving from volunteer to paid, as well as created an onboarding program for new drivers.
When Pills2Me started paying these caregivers, it cut the average time for a delivery request down to just 30 minutes. (With volunteers, it could sometimes take hours to fulfill orders.) "The volunteers had other jobs, or they were students," Asanga said. "They were squeezing in time for deliveries in between. But now we had people that were just sitting on the phone waiting for orders to grab and deliver."
As the startup evolved in real time, Asanga continued to look for investment. In 2023, he was named one of the U.S. recipients of the Google for Startups Black and Latino Founders Fund. The fund provides entrepreneurs with a $150,000 equity-free cash award to help fuel new businesses as well as sales and fundraising training and technical support from Google mentors to help take entrepreneurs to the next level.
With the additional funding, Asanga was, in fact, able to take Pills2Me to the next level.
From New Haven to Las Vegas
Asanga, who is originally from Cameroon, came to the U.S. in 2010. Four years later, he settled in Las Vegas, which has become his home. So when he finished graduate school in May 2020, he returned back there with the dream of offering the Pills2Me service to his local community.
With the city's aging population, it seemed a good match.
"Post-graduation, I thought about where would be a stable place that could be a good launchpad for this," he said. "It just happened to be this place I thought of as home."
Since then, the on-demand service has become available in other major U.S. cities, including Chicago and Houston. While it started as a free service for older adults and immunocompromised people, Pills2Me can now be used by anyone.
"The COVID-19 pandemic elevated the importance of innovation and social entrepreneurship in the field of public health," Kaveh Khoshnood, '89 M.P.H., '95 Ph.D., an assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies at YSPH and a Pills2Me advisor, told YSPH last year. "Our aim is to support students such as Leslie to launch their innovative projects and turn them into sustainable and impactful companies.
"I am so proud of Leslie and hope his work inspires our current students to launch their own innovative approaches to solve public health challenges in the U.S. and globally."
The company now uses a dynamic pricing model based on a range of factors, including distance and traffic. Last year, the company introduced a new nationwide vertical, Shifts by Pills2Me, a platform used by partner pharmacies to staff their pharmacies with pharmacists and pharmacy technicians on-demand. These workers benefit from work flexibility while pharmacy owners save money by hiring temporary staff as they need additional support.
For Asanga, this work is incredibly profound. Customers often call the company asking to speak with him. He remembers hearing from one older customer in particular whose husband died from cancer. She told Asanga that Pills2Me had been an integral part of his care journey. She often relied on the app to get his medications delivered to their home.
"Those are the moments that really define the meaning of what we do," he said. "When an order comes through, it could be a life-or-death situation."
