Student entrepreneur a prize finalist

When Greg Waldstreicher was looking for an e-prescribing application to help his father keep better track of his medications, he said he found the available systems to be "convoluted and expensive."

So he developed his own.

Waldstreicher, a senior accounting major in the university's Hinman CEOs program, is now one of five finalists for Entrepreneur Magazine's College Entrepreneur of 2010 award for the DoseSpot company he co-founded with a friend last year.

In theory, e-prescribing makes it possible for doctors to send clear, type-written prescription orders directly to a patient's pharmacy over the Internet, Waldstreicher said. But, he said, many existing programs are riddled with long lists of drugs and require too many steps, making them inconvenient and time-consuming to fill out.

Waldstreicher — with New York University senior Gideon Platt, a high school friend — envisioned a "lower cost, friendly user-interface" in which users simply "type the first few letters of a drug, for example, ‘Lip' for ‘Lipitor' and all the drugs with ‘Lip' will come up," he said.

"Our company slogan is ‘click, click, prescribe,'" Waldstreicher said.

Waldsteicher wouldn't divulge all of DoseSpot's functions because of non-disclosure issues, but promised it was innovative.

"It's a very unique system," Waldstreicher said. "It's something the industry hasn't adopted yet."

After developing the idea for the company, Waldstreicher said Hinman CEOs — a university living-learning program for entrepreneurs — helped DoseSpot come alive.

"They gave us access to a lot of funding, and the consulting and advice has really helped us," Waldstreicher said. "They've helped us every step of the way."

DoseSpot already has several clients who have integrated its application into the existing networks of several medical software companies, making the switch to the new application seamless for some doctors who have already digitally complied lab reports, x-rays and patient records via the software companies, Waldstreicher said.

He expects more clients to come soon as demand continues to grow for e-prescription systems. Federal incentives are encouraging more and more doctors to implement electronic record-keeping, including e-prescriptions, which will be mandatory by 2014.

"DoseSpot isn't just a project," Waldstreicher said. "It's a company we'd like to work with for the next couple of years, and we want to be along for the health care boom, ride."

The Entrepreneur Magazine competition — in which the public votes among finalists in three categories, including college entrepreneurs — isn't Waldstreicher's first with DoseSpot.

In May, it won first place — and $10,000 — in the undergraduate category of the university $75K Business Plan Competition, plus a $5,000 Warren Citrin Social Impact Award. Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute's Impact Seed Fund also provided the company with $10,000.

If Waldstreicher wins the College Entrepreneurs award, DoseSpot would receive $5,000 and Waldstreicher would be profiled in the January and December 2011 issues of Entrepreneur Magazine. The magazine estimates the profiles represent a total of more than $230,000 in free publicity.

"The most valuable prizes are actually the articles that would be written about us," Waldstreicher said. "To get that exposure and marketing for the company would be amazing."

You can vote for Waldstreicher in the College Entrepreneurs competition on the magazine's website at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/e2010/vote/college.php#313

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