Jon discusses vitaCare, a pharmacy services platform acquired by GoodRx earlier this year. vitaCare helps patients understand coverage, identifies available savings opportunities, and facilitates communications between providers and payers. It also offers a path for filling a prescription, primarily through their network of third-party pharmacies.
Click here to learn more about vitaCare’s access and adherence solutions.
Read on for Jon’s insights.
vitaCare From GoodRx Reimagines Prescription Services for a Wider Range of Patients and Treatments Than Traditional Hub Services (Guest Post)
By Jon Lanznar, Chief Strategy Officer, vitaCare Prescription Services from GoodRx.
Yet moving beyond analog and dehumanizing is not just about embracing technology. It’s a mindset shift that will not suffer unnecessary and duplicative paper forms, bloated and overly complex processes, ambiguously long timelines, and being physically tied to a specific time or location. It means the ability to help one thousand patients almost as easily as helping one.
And the opposite of dehumanizing is humanizing, which is also nuanced in the context of healthcare. To humanize is to truly ‘see’ each patient—each person—as a unique individual who just happens to be ill. To humanize is to communicate with your patients using great care, and not label a person as a ‘cancer sufferer’ or a ‘omeprazole user.’ To humanize means to understand that many patients are confused, overwhelmed, and simply not able to navigate the system and gain access to their prescribed therapy. For many patients, the ‘burden of access’ can rival the burden of the disease.
VITACARE LEVERAGES THE SCALE OF GOODRX
Many thousands of patients, providers, and pharmacists have already discovered that vitaCare—acquired by GoodRx earlier this year—is a new kind of pharmacy services platform. vitaCare delivers an efficient yet humanizing experience that helps more patients receive their prescriptions in a low-friction, affordable, and transparent manner, and stay on their prescribed therapies as long as appropriate. In addition to portfolio synergies, the teams at vitaCare and GoodRx share the belief that everyone deserves affordable, accessible, and convenient healthcare.
The vitaCare pharmacy services platform helps patients understand coverage, identifies available savings opportunities, and facilitates communications between providers and payers. It also provides a seamless path for filling a prescription, primarily through our network of third-party pharmacies. vitaCare has further strengthened GoodRx’s rapidly growing Pharma Manufacturer Solutions offerings that span medication awareness, access, and adherence with a range of unique capabilities.
PROVIDING A LEAN ALTERNATIVE TO TRADITIONAL PHARMACY SERVICES
Hub services are usually reserved for high-cost specialty medications with margins able to fund high-touch services like prior auth and reimbursement support, product delivery and training, coordination with companion diagnostics, and live, one-on-one nurse education and counseling. vitaCare is unique, offering prescription services for a wider range of patients and treatments. It provides most of these capabilities through a unified platform—plus some services that many hubs don’t offer—and is more affordable for traditionally retail-distributed prescription products as well as specialty medicines. vitaCare simplifies and streamlines the process to ensure patients start and stay on their prescribed therapies. (See Figure 1.)
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DELIVERING RESULTS FOR PATIENTS, PROVIDERS, PAYERS, AND PHARMA
When we enhance the customer experience, patients can more easily access, afford, and understand their prescribed therapies—and all healthcare stakeholders win. And we give patients more choice, including when and how they receive their medications. vitaCare also removes friction from the ecosystem, reduces supply chain costs, increases speed, and ultimately improves the gross-to-net for pharma manufacturers. Our entrepreneurial roots, and the fact that we were built by a pharmaceutical manufacturer to serve the needs of pharmaceutical manufacturers, gives us a ‘flexibility perspective’ to solve a wide range of problems for our clients. And being part of GoodRx gives us staggering scale and a breadth of capabilities that truly span the entire patient journey.
INCREMENTAL IMPROVEMENTS ON A MASSIVE SCALE
I find it interesting how many tech startups outside of the traditional healthcare ecosystem insist they have a silver bullet that will solve one or more of the system’s biggest problems. What they fail to realize is that it is a system—albeit fragmented, expensive, and suboptimal—and it’s extremely difficult to disrupt one sector without causing unintended consequences in others.
Yet when we apply incremental improvements to this massive $4.1 trillion healthcare system (value as of 2020), its sheer scale delivers outsized gains. At vitaCare we help make small improvements at both the individual level and at scale, and enable short-term gains in access and adherence that add up to long-term savings and improved health outcomes.
Visit vitaCare to learn more about our capabilities and program performance.
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