Healthcare IPO: Tabula Rasa of Moorestown raises $52M (Updated)

Tabula Rasa Healthcare, the Moorestown drug program manager run by the husband-and-wife team of Drs. Calvin and Ursula Knowlton, raised $52 million this week in its initial public stock offering on the Nasdaq stock market. The company had earlier hoped to raise over $100 million. Sales totalled $60 milllion last year, and $38 million in the first half of 2016.

"We got our company public," board member Bruce Luehrs, of Philadelphia's Rittenhouse venture funds, a Tablua Rasa investor, told me cheerfully. "It's performed well," rising as much as 25 percent above the $12 a share offering price in early trading. "It's a good thing for the region."

Tabula Rasa employed 204 at Aug. 31, up from 29 in 2011, the year it was founded. Three-quarters work in Moorestown, others at an IT center in Charleston and pharmacies in California and Colorado.

Tabula Rasa in its most recent SEC filing says it plans to use the IPO proceeds mostly to pay back investors and lenders:  "to repay approximately $34.2 million of our outstanding indebtedness, to pay the remaining portion of the cash purchase price of $5.0 million for the acquisition of primarily intellectual property and software assets."

The rest of the money will help "to develop new product offerings, to enter into new market segments with our existing solutions, to expand our sales and marketing infrastructure" and buy other businesses. Tabula Rasa does business under the CareKinesis brand, among others.

Tabula Rasa calls itself "the market leader in providing medication risk management to Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly, or PACE," through which "participating healthcare organizations provide fully integrated healthcare delivery on an at-risk basis for elderly adults, most of whom are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, where we believe we have a significant opportunity to continue to grow."

The typical patient is enrolled more than four years, double the typical stay five years ago, the company says, citing a report from AEC Consulting LLC. And a lot more Americans are eligible, than are currently participating under taxpayer-funded Medicare Advantage programs -- where Tabula Rasa plans to market its services.

The Knowltons previously founded Philadelphia-based hospice drug supplier Xcellerex, now part of GE Healthcare LifeSciences.