GoodRx has established itself as a prominent player in the health and wellness industry over the past decade, recognized as a significant consumer-focused digital healthcare platform.
The company is arguably most well-known for its search platform that allows consumers to compare drug prices across different pharmacies. On Thursday, GoodRx launched a similar platform for healthcare providers.
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The new platform, called “Provider Mode,” is designed to help providers search for drug cost information while they are conducting appointments with their patients.
Giving providers the ability to quickly gather medication pricing information before they send their patients to the pharmacy is important because “affordability issues are something providers deal with on a daily basis,” Dr. Preeti Parikh, GoodRx’s executive medical director, said in an interview. She is a practicing pediatrician and professor at The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
With a patient in front of them, providers can view a prescription’s price across all local and virtual pharmacies, with dosage and quantity accounted for. The platform also enables providers to print out medication coupons for patients, as well as gives them the option to send coupons via email or text without sharing a personal email address or phone number.
Once a provider begins to use the platform, GoodRx creates a personalized category for their most-searched drugs, allowing them to instantly assess information about the medications their patients are prescribed the most.
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Provider Mode includes additional tools that allow providers to compare other drugs in the same class, examine whether patients can save money by purchasing a higher prescription quantity, and assess medication delivery options. The platform also features a news feed populated with industry news and educational content personalized to a provider’s specialty.
GoodRx rolled out Provider Mode after it noticed more than 850,000 prescribers had used its consumer-facing platform since June 2021. The company launched the new platform because it realized that “a lot of the conversations” that providers were having with their patients about drug costs were happening via phone after the patient had gone to the pharmacy instead of at the point of care, according to Dr. Parikh.
“We wanted to create a platform where the provider can give all of this information at the point of care during the visit,” she said. “That way, we can really take away all the burden of those phone calls.”
Along with its launch of Provider Mode, GoodRx also announced a collaboration with Biogen meant to improve the way providers initiate new specialty medications with their patients. Under the collaboration, providers who want to prescribe Vumerity, a drug treating patients with relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis, can do so via an enrollment form on the platform. Vumerity is a drug that requires patients to be admitted into a specialty hub, a process that can take up to a month if done manually, Dr. Parikh said.
Before the end of the year, GoodRx will add two more features to Provider Mode meant to cut down on the time prescribers spend on administrative tasks, according to Dr. Parikh.
One will enable prescribers to talk directly to pharmaceutical manufacturers about drug costs and patients’ savings options. The other is designed to give providers more information about drug costs as they relate to their patients’ insurance carriers and provide details need to streamline the prior authorization process.
Photo: cagkansayin, Getty Images
