Iowa-based TelePharm has raised $2.5 million from venture capitalist John Pappajohn and Bruce Rastetter, president of the Iowa state Board of Regents. The company, which is also a member of the Rock Health accelerator, will use the funds to scale its business, which connects pharmacists to one another and to patients via cloud-based mobile apps.

"I think the pharmacists’ position is changing," TelePharm CEO Roby Miller told MobiHealthNews. "Instead of just counting pills and dispensing drugs, they are repositioning themselves to become more of a provider of healthcare and I think we’re trying to help them and enable them to become healthcare professionals."

TelePharm has several different businesses that help pharmacists spread their expertise across multiple pharmacies. This allows local chains with spaced out rural pharmacies to reduce their overhead significantly. One business, TeleCheck, allows for remote verification of medications, one of the most important and time-consuming jobs pharmacists do.

"What a pharmacist does is, they have two different responsibilities: verifying it’s the right drug for that patient and basically making sure the patient will be safe with that drug, and making sure what the technician dispensed was the right drug," Miller said. "What TeleCheck does, is it takes that workflow and puts it in the cloud. So a pharmacist has an image of the drug they’re dispensing, the label on the bottle, and the [prescription] as well. So they can compare those images and make sure the drug is the right prescription for that patient."

The other service, which actually allows pharmacists to virtually interact with the patient directly, is called TeleCounsel. It's used by hospitals with a pharmacist on staff to provide discharge counseling for patients leaving the hospital. Talking with a pharmacist before leaving the hospital leads to better adherence, Miller said, but is again often difficult to facilitate because it requires one pharmacist to be in so many different places in a large hospital or hospital system. With TeleCounsel, a pharmacist can talk to many different patients and even counsel patients after they go home.

This is the first round of funding for the company, which was founded in August 2012. TelePharm's software is currently in eight small, regional pharmacy chains in three states: Iowa, Illinois, and Texas.

"We’re trying to prove that you don’t have to be on the East or West coast to make a company successful," he said. "You can do it in a smaller midwestern setting."

In an era of large chain pharmacies like Walgreens and CVS, which use mobile and web to add to the convenience of their many locations, it can be challenging for small local pharmacies to stay relevant. McKesson's Health Mart franchise service, which went mobile last fall, is another effort to help those small chains keep pace with new technology.