Worcester Business Journal

4 Worcester Business Journal | April 27, 2020 | wbjournal.com C E N T R A L M AS S I N B R I E F RxAdvance doubling its workforce, moving into larger Southborough space V E R BAT I M Home frontline workers "Ultimately, I have seen the selflessness of my field staff who have focused on caring for patients even when putting their safety at risk." Milka Njoroge, CEO of Worcester healthcare provider Century Homecare, on her workers who continue to visit regular patients amid the COVID-19 pandemic The new office layout "We're anticipating the workstation design will shift or require modifications. Many workers won't necessarily want to be working at low-benching stations with co-workers nearby and no barriers between them." Bruce Platzman, CEO of Leominster furniture manufacturer AIS, which is anticipating changes in the types of furniture for post- pandemic offices B.T.'s Worcester opening "My birthday is May 18. I would like to spend it with my staff in the new restaurant." Billy Nemeroff, co-owner of the planned B.T.'s Fried Chicken and BBQ in Worcester, on the target opening date for the expansion of the Sturbridge-based restaurant R xAdvance, a Southborough pharmacy benefit manager, is planning a major expansion this summer into a new building allowing a more than doubling of its staff size. e firm, which today has about 200 workers, expects to grow to 500 by the first quarter of next year with a planned business deal that Ravi Ika, RxAdvance's founder and CEO, said he wasn't yet able to offer specifics on. "We have a lot of strategic initiatives going on," Ika said. RxAdvance plans to move by the end of July into more than 80,000 square feet as the sole tenant leasing at 136 Turnpike Road, the former Route 9 offices for the medical optics firm Olympus Corp. Olympus is moving into a new 150,000-square-foot building being built at 800 West Park Drive in Westborough where the company plans to relocate up to 400 employees from its Southborough and Littleton sites, with plans for increased hiring over the next five years. Coincidentally, the trio of office buildings making up Southborough Place where RxAdvance is moving was once home to Ika's previous firm, ikaSystems, a company he ran for 12 years before selling to Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan in 2015. RxAdvance is based today in a roughly 30,000-square-foot space at 2 Central Park Drive, about 2.5 miles to the west down Route 9 at the Westborough town line. e company provides pharmacy benefit management technology to health plans, exchanges, state Medicaid programs, employer groups and accountable care organizations, or ACOs. Attracting a young & diverse workforce RxAdvance, a private firm Ika founded in 2013, expects revenue this year to top $2 billion. Among its major investors are Walgreens and Centene, a Missouri-based health plan manager, both of which formed a strategic partnership with RxAdvance last fall for what they called a new model for pharmacy management. RxAdvance has a young and diverse workforce, more than half living in the Boston area, Ika said. About three- quarters of employees are Millennials or Generation Z, he said, and two- thirds are first-generation immigrants. e company also draws heavily on new graduates from Massachusetts schools like Babson College, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Boston University and Northeastern University. e workforce includes a small sales and management team of about 10 people, with the rest split between those in operations and implementation and those building technology and platforms. RxAdvance wanted to stay locally where it could devote more to salaries to attract talented workers than on rent in, say, Boston's Seaport neighborhood, Ika said. e company is planning to run buses between the new Southborough office and Boston to help with commuting. W BY GRANT WELKER Worcester Business Journal News Editor A rendering of the new RxAdvance site in Southborough

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