Adam Torres and Sofia Carvalho discuss SecretBox.
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Show Notes:
SecretBox aims to improve medication adherence and reduce misuse risks. In this episode, Adam Torres and Sofia Carvalho, Founder & CEO at SecretBox, explore Sofia’s entrepreneurial journey and SecretBox.
About Sofia Carvalho
With a Master’s in Biomedical Engineering, an MBA in Finance from Pepperdine, and a background in biochemistry, She combined her expertise to tackle pressing healthcare challenges through innovative solutions.
Currently, she serve as the CEO and Founder of SecretBox, a health-tech company revolutionizing medication adherence and safety. their flagship product—a smart, tech-enabled pill bottle—addresses critical issues like medication misuse, overdose prevention, and compliance, while reducing healthcare costs. Her vision is to leverage technology to create safer, more efficient systems for patients, providers, and payers alike.
She is passionate about healthcare innovation, value-based care, and empowering underserved communities. Her diverse experience ranges from working on large-scale health insurance initiatives to spearheading a med-tech startup addressing the opioid epidemic.
About SecretBox
Ahealth-tech company revolutionizing medication compliance and safety. Their smart pill bottle dispenses precise doses, tracks real-time adherence, and integrates with pharmacy and healthcare systems. With AI-powered compliance verification, tamper resistance, and caregiver data sharing, SecretBox reduces misuse risks, improves patient outcomes, and supports safe, independent medication management.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I have Sofia Carvalho on the line and she is founder and CEO over at Secretbox, Sofia, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Adam. be on here. All right, Sophia. So I understand that were sent over to us and introduced to the show by Brad Turner, who’s going to be hosting the Newport Beach Investor Conference this Thursday, March 20th. I’m excited. I’ll be going and for everybody listening.
I’ll be doing some podcast interviews live and just really having a lot of fun. It’ll be my, maybe my second or third year attending this conference. Sophia, have you been to one before? No, no, this, 1 is going to be my 1st attending. Yeah, it’s a great time to be attending because it’s right in our backyard.
So it’ll, it’ll be fun. Amazing. So, so then you’re out of Orange County. Yeah. Newport area. No, I’m, I’m actually out of Long Beach. Oh, okay. Got it. Got it. All right. Well, let’s dive right in here. I want to learn more about a secret box and what you’re going to do. And really just talk about medication adherence in general and how you came about solving that problem.
So, where did all that start for you? So my background way back when pre COVID my life was kind of set up to go to medical school, become a doctor and, you know, help humanity that way. But you know what they say, man, you know, plans and God last. So what actually happening was I just finished my master’s in biomedical engineering.
I was about to go into my first year of medical school and sent us all home . Yeah. Because of the pandemic and basically they were discussing, you know, should we do med school online or everything was just kind of up in the air and I decided at that point, I didn’t want to learn how to become a doctor online.
So I thought, okay, I’ve always liked business. So I’m gonna go get my MBA in the meantime. And then I’ll come back to med school. It should be, a good thing to have an MBA as a doctor, too. I thought, never thought I’d start a company or anything like that. But my grandmother at the same time, while I was doing my MBA she was having a hard time with keeping tracking of her medications as well as myself , sometimes you just can’t keep tracking of what you’re taking and if you did take it I looked online And was try to find a solution for her and me.
And I couldn’t find a or anything that was actually easy enough to use, was solving where the problem was originated. And so I decided. Pretty quickly, this was that I had the idea to create secret box of twenty four and couple weeks later is when I started to building secret box.
And that’s kind of how my journey. Wow. And so going from being on the road. For it to met from medical doctor to entrepreneur, what is like, what were the people around you saying? I’m always interested in that. Cause that’s a pretty big shift, especially if I don’t, it doesn’t sound like you’ve been talking about all these entrepreneurial dreams prior to.
Am I off on that? Right. Yeah. No, I had not had any sort of, you know, entrepreneurial drive before that. It was I was speaking to a doctor at the time
asking them for their 2 cents. Like, , what should I do? Should I, you know, just go through with it. Should I go get my MBA? And one of them, which is he actually sits on our advisory board. His name is Dr. Zeppieri, Justin, and so I spoke to Justin and I I asked him and he kind of just, he was the one who actually made my decision for me, basically, because he asked me Sophie, if you go to medical school, how many, why are you going to go?
And I said to help people and he said, well, how many people do you think you can actually help if you do? And I said, I don’t know, maybe in my lifetime of, okay. I hope a couple, maybe a couple thousand. If I get there and you said, okay, then, but if you go the entrepreneur route or you go to the MBA route, what happened there?
How many people could you, you know, potentially help? And I said, oh, like millions. And he was like, well, I think they’re decisions made for you. And I said, yeah, that’s actually, I just never had looked at it that way. And so now, what was your next step? So you’re making this transition.
You come up with this idea, secret box. And what’s your next step? How do you get this idea off the ground? Yeah, I just I called a lot of advisors that I had from my MBA. So, another one of them that is on our board, Vince, I called him and I said, Vince, I have this idea. I have no idea where to start and I just, what do I do?
And he kind of walked me through the first couple steps and then It was just a very sharp learning curve with, because everything is just, you know, completely different in the world of startups. They don’t teach you these, how to launch a startup in business school at all. So it was kind of just drinking out of a fire hydrant and just going at full speed and just iterating.
So my next, I guess, steps where I just try to create a pitch deck I just started talking to people about my idea. And then slowly, but surely just kind of went from there and started to really define my problem. What the problem actually was really drilling down on that. And then drilling down on the solution.
But the part that was super important to me was, I didn’t want to pass the cost burden on to meet the patient of whatever I created. I didn’t want the patient to have to pay for it. I wanted the insurance companies to be the ones to pay for it. So. It was really driving home and doing the, research on, okay, why are they going to pay for it?
What’s in it for them? So really driving home that value prop. So that took a long time. And then as I was doing all of that research, we started building out the actual physical bottle and doing , the tech behind that and filing all the necessary patents and so on and so forth.
But it’s been a wild ride, but I think since we started the company, we have filed all the patents. We’ve come up with a proof of concept of the actual bottle and of the software as well. We’ve spoken to different, you know, CROs and pharmacies and insurance companies that are all very interested in what we’re building.
So it’s something that we’re excited about. So, how does secret box improve medication adherence and, reduce misuse risk? Like, , how exactly does it do it? So it basically, so the patient still goes to the pharmacy , and, gets , their prescription like they normally do. Only difference is that your prescription now comes in my bottle.
And then once you’re basically home and ready to use it. You basically pair the bottle to the app on the phone and you would basically hit just dispense and the bottle will spit out exactly how the prescriptions written. So if it’s if the doctor wrote the prescription to be 1 pill every 6 hours, that’s all the bottles and spit out.
And then if it’s, for example, something that’s very heavily controlled, like an opioid or a narcotic, for example, once you hit dispense, your camera on your smartphone will basically watch you take it. It’s not a human being doing it. It’s our software and I will basically scan the video for 2 things.
It’ll check if it was the person that was on the bottle is the 1 taking it. And that secondly, they’re actually putting into their mouth and ingesting it. So thereby they’re being compliant. So something in that was crazy to me was that once I started actually digging into the problem about, why medication adherence, like, why does that even matter?
It was, I came across a stat that was, it was 44 people per day die from prescription misuse in the U. S. Wow. Um, And furthermore, I mean, 50 percent of patients don’t take their medication as prescribed. I mean, that’s 50 percent of the population and that, and the average person has four prescriptions. So to me, , it’s something that’s like.
Once you start actually thinking about these numbers, it’s it’s a massive, problem. So basically, our solution allows for a, you know, smart tamper proof, dispensing mechanism. There is real time tracking. So once that, patient goes through all that, dispensing of their medication, they take their medication.
All of that information is then relayed back to the provider. So, whomever it was that wrote the prescription is basically able to follow along their prescription journey. And so talk to me a little bit more about maybe some of those costs you mentioned some, obviously some of the deaths and things that are happening, of course, but what about the cost?
Like, how does this impact healthcare costs in general? Yeah, so in terms of just there’s healthcare costs associated with, like, from the insurance level, there’s, you know, the government level, but it costs around just broadly healthcare cost is about 2 trillion dollars annually due to non adherence.
And then I was touched on earlier, I really wanted to drill down onto the why of insurance companies. So why would they even pay for this? So when we did our health care economics study, we broke it down by prescription type. And so what we found was, I mean, not super surprising, but per opioid prescription, the ROI or return on investment for the insurance companies was a 57 X.
With using the technology and then all the way through for like your regular prescription your blood pressure medication or what have you. It was still a forex return. So it’s a huge financial incentive for them to implement something like this as well as something like this because it reduces the need for hospitalization for ER visits because of missed doses or complications or what have you.
So overall, it’s just kind of. You know, , it’s savings for both the insurers, the healthcare providers as well as, it’s 1 of those things that serves also as a preventative measure in terms of you know, an addiction or overdose type scenario. So, because it’s limiting the, number of pills that the patient has access to it’s something that I hope will be some, it’ll act as also preventative as well as an ongoing type care.
You mentioned that secret box leverages AI. I think you said with facial recognition, maybe go a little bit further into that and kind of like plans , for what you plan on doing with this in the future. Yeah, so we’re using AI right now for like, like we were saying the video recognition.
So it’ll do those 2 things that I had mentioned. So it’ll verify the ingestion and the identity of the patient, but it’ll also serve as sort of like using predictive analytics for. Early intervention, so it’ll analyze the adherence trends that since it’s kind of that middle person or middle person, I call it, but kind of like the middle ground between the doctor, the provider and the patient, it’s able to, you know, kind of synthesize all of that data that it’s.
getting from both sides, right? And being able to analyze all of this data and analyze all the trends in terms of adherence. So it’s able to actually then identify high risk patients before they become not compliant is our hope that the, I will be able to accomplish that as well as at along that same vein is allowing that to then notify the providers and the insurers.
So we can actually target interventions before things, you know. Can escalator or go down further. So we also want to use it for integration with the pharmacy systems with the health care system. So having everybody. My whole goal is just so that everybody can have better insights on to, you know, what’s happening at the patient level.
What’s happening at the prescription level. So being able to use and leverage to have this seamless data sharing and more. So, like, a customizable Type of support mechanism that it can tailor the certain insights , that it’s able to gather based on who wants that data.
Amazing. Well, Sophia, this has been great having you on the show today. I really enjoyed learning more about your box and I, and I’m excited to hear your, pitch over at Newport beach investor conference this March 20th. That being said, if somebody wants to learn more about Secretbox or to follow up, how do they do that?
Yeah, so they can learn more about us at our website secretbox. ai or they’re more than welcome to, you know, email me, Sophia, S O F I A at secretbox. ai. Fantastic. If everybody listening, just so you know, my team will definitely put the links in the show notes, so you can just click on it and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along your journey as well. So, again, hit that subscribe or follow button.
And Sophia, look forward to seeing you on Thursday. Have a great rest of your week. Thanks, Adam. You too.