Since 2013, PillPack has worked to put customers at the center of the pharmacy experience. Our service makes it easier for people with chronic conditions to manage medications. Now, we’re beginning to see the results of this work play out on a large scale. PillPack has tens of thousands of customers across the country, will do over $100 million in revenue this year, and has launched PharmacyOS, the first backend pharmacy system designed specifically for customers with complex medication regimens.

We’re far from done. Health care businesses that are successful in tomorrow’s market will figure out how to take on risk, deliver improved outcomes, and earn margin based on that success. Recent developments suggest this world may be closer than it seems. The Affordable Care Act changed the way that providers get paid, shifting to focus on outcomes rather than quantity of services delivered. And there’s little argument that when incentives are aligned to keep people healthy, the market is more efficient. PillPack was built in anticipation of this evolution.

Over the last year, the industry shifted in a promising direction. CVS and Anthem are teaming up to build a new model of pharmacy benefits management. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are evaluating ideas to create more transparency and clarity. And Amazon is silently looming in the background, allowing rampant speculation about how it might change industry dynamics even further. It’s exciting to see established players start to think in new ways.

Mr. Messina and Dr. Summers have helped us both catalyze and navigate changes in the industry so far, and their expertise will be invaluable in PillPack’s next phase of growth.

Allies and opportunities

For over two years, Jim Messina has worked with us to broker conversations with key influencers, insurance providers (or “payers”) and pharmacy benefit managers (PBM’s). For each of these important stakeholders, Jim helped identify who we should connect with, helped make those connections, and helped us deliver a clear, consistent message.

At times, the established industry has been difficult to navigate. Most visibly when we publicly clashed with Express Scripts, but also in numerous other behind-the-scenes conversations with similar players. Jim helped us sort out many of these situations. In most cases, disagreements stemmed from the fact that PillPack doesn’t fall neatly into an existing category of pharmacy. Instead, we’ve taken the best parts of retail, long-term care, and mail-order to create a wholly different kind of service that better meets the needs of customers managing multiple daily medications. We’ve argued before that the only way health care will get better in this country is by allowing new and innovative solutions to thrive. With Jim’s help, we spent the last few years successfully explaining the necessity of innovation and the benefits of our approach to a wide range of thoughtful people and influential partners. These contacts often became ardent PillPack supporters, and we’re now working productively with a range of payers, providers, and PBMs.

We’re inspired by Jim’s drive to improve healthcare delivery in America, so that it better serves everyday people. As a Director on our Board, Jim will help us orchestrate conversations, engage with new partners, and ultimately launch programs designed to make life easier for the tens of millions of Americans that manage chronic conditions.

New models of service

While PillPack’s service model is unique, our business model today is relatively similar to any other pharmacy. That means we can work and build a business within the system as it exists today. It’s a core reason why Jim’s education campaign and efforts to date have been successful: we aren’t asking for dramatic change immediately. We simply want to provide a beneficial service for customers within the existing structure.

However, our model also anticipates a different, better version of the world. One where it’s much easier to hinge the financial incentives of core players (payers, manufacturers, and retailers) around health outcomes for the end consumer. This vision is aligned with that of Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, who is a renowned thought-leader on the economics and policy of health care and has been in the middle of these conversations for many years.

Since I first met Dr. Summers, he has informally helped us analyze market dynamics in the changing landscape. We’re working with him to explore new models of care delivery and the economic structure that can help the US get to a sustainable drug distribution system with appropriately aligned incentives. Today, PillPack is in a position to begin to catalyze the changes we want to see in the future. We’re honored that Dr. Summers has chosen to join us in a formal advisory role. Going forward, Dr. Summers will help us drive progress and partner with other consumer- and outcomes-focused entities to change the structure of pharmacy.

On behalf of the PillPack team and Board, I’m proud to welcome Mr. Messina and Dr. Summers to our mission.

Read more about this announcement in our November 29, 2017 press release.

Welcoming Jim Messina and Larry Summers to PillPack was originally published in The Team at PillPack on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

PillPack is still the only independent pharmacy that serves customers nationwide.

PillPack was founded around the idea that your pharmacy can, and should, be the cornerstone for better health. We believe that if it’s easy to take medications as prescribed, people will do it. And, for folks with chronic conditions, research shows that medication adherence goes a long way towards achieving health goals. It’s a simple premise, and one that we’ve focused on intently for the past three years.

Since PillPack launched in 2014, we’ve helped make it easier for tens of thousands of customers to stay adherent to their medications. We are now delivering hundreds of thousands of prescriptions a month, have grown to more than 500 team members, and will do more than $100 million in revenue this year. PillPack is still the only independent pharmacy that serves customers nationwide.

By staying on track with medications you’re taking a positive action for your health — just like exercising or eating well.

Today, we’re proud to introduce our next evolution, which is both physical and digital. We’re launching new physical products targeted at improving adherence, and announcing our home-grown software platform that now powers all our pharmacy operations and delivers a better customer experience. These things together help us shift from just offering simple, convenient packaging to providing a comprehensive service for managing chronic conditions.

More medications, fewer problems

The new digital component is called “PharmacyOS”. It’s a brand new operating system that we built from the ground up. This is the first pharmacy software that makes it easy for both pharmacists and customers to manage multiple daily medications and replaces the patchwork of legacy software that’s still used in nearly every other pharmacy across the country.

Existing pharmacy software is mostly designed to process one prescription transaction at a time. As soon as you start adding on multiple meds, its ability to coordinate for a customer quickly breaks down. For someone with a chronic condition, each medication makes fill timing, insurance, refills, and dosing instructions more complicated. Five medications means dealing with five times the complexity. A therapy plan quickly becomes more than any one person can manage.

PharmacyOS is the first pharmacy software that makes it easy for both pharmacists and customers to manage multiple daily medications.

By using PharmacyOS behind the scenes to support every prescription, insurance claim, and customer inquiry that comes through PillPack, we can minimize the complexity of dealing with multiple medications. For customers, this means streamlined service, fewer back-and-forth phone calls, and more control over how their end-to-end medication plan is managed.

Being healthy should feel good

The new physical component is centered around a dispenser that’s designed to have a permanent place in a PillPack customer’s home. (Our old dispenser was recyclable plastic and you got a new one every month). We know that routines are a huge part of adherence, but it’s hard to build a routine around clumsy orange bottles that you hide in a drawer.

The durable dispenser is custom designed to make it enjoyable to interact with your medications. It provides an important visual reminder that by staying on track with medications you’re taking a positive action for your health — just like exercising or eating well. It also comes in four colors (purple, green, blue, or gray), so different people in the same household can choose their own style. Finally, we also have a new travel pouch to make traveling with medications simple, and to protect your privacy when taking meds on-the-go.

We believe that if it’s easy to take medications as prescribed, people will do it.

Medication is already at the center of healthcare for many people, but most pharmacies exist almost exclusively to facilitate the transactional dispensing of medication. The next evolution of PillPack is designed to dramatically improve the critical relationship between a person and the medications they take to maintain their health. Our new digital and physical products are a big step towards that goal and are already making a difference for tens of thousands of customers across the country.

For more information, please email press@pillpack.com.

The Next Evolution of PillPack: Pharmacy (Even More) Simplified was originally published in The Team at PillPack on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our media is a reflection of our society — general opinion affects what we create, and what is created affects the general opinion. Today, we focus on the extremes of health. We endlessly celebrate world-class athletes. We fixate on TV shows about extreme weight loss and addiction. People with any sort of health issue are either portrayed as heroes who defied the odds, or sick, unfortunate souls who succumbed to their disease. While all this makes for great entertainment, it doesn’t get us any closer to really understanding each other.

The idea of living with conditions is slowly starting to seep into popular culture. There have been important and inspiring stories that help us understand, adjust, and redefine how we think about health and staying healthy.

Still, nearly half of American adults live with a chronic condition that they’ll deal with for their entire life. Until the stories we tell better reflect this reality, we will continue to stigmatize anything outside the mainstream definition of perfect health.

For our part, we’re launching Folks, an effort aimed at helping us redefine the idea of “normal”. The site is dedicated to sharing stories of regular people doing incredible things. These remarkable people are also working through health issues, but those issues do not define them. We hope to share important stories that will inspire you. We also hope we create new conversations about how we talk about our health.

Folks will cover the spectrum of what health means to each of us. We won’t avoid the heroic stories and the sad stories, but we will also tell stories of everyday life and the humor, banality, and joy associated with being a human.

No one is defined by just one aspect of their life; our health is no different.

We’ve shared these stories in our first issue:

• How two life-long friends travelled 500 miles and summited the Pyrenees mountains, one of them making the journey in a wheelchair
• A health advocate from Staten Island who turned her battle with Lupus on its head with the help of snail mucus and Korean pop music
• Impressionist icon Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and how he continued to paint through his final years, despite debilitating rheumatoid arthritis
• A dancer and how she’s led a successful career (and started a performance company called Sugar-Free Entertainment) while managing Type 1 diabetes

We’re excited to share these and many more. We’ll publish several every week and we hope that you’ll help us share them with the world. While we’re excited, we’re also a little cautious — there is razor thin line between celebrating someone for being unique and objectifying them for being different. This is evidence that we all have a lot to learn, and we’ll do no better by doing nothing.

The social progress being made around understanding and respecting each other — whether it’s through the lens of race, gender, sexuality, faith or otherwise — is inspiring. We’ve come far and have a long way to go. It’s time to also reconsider how we knowingly and unknowingly categorize people based on their health.

We need to rethink what it means to be “normal”. Only then can we all help each other stay healthy.

We welcome all of your feedback — and story ideas — at folks@pillpack.com.

-TJ Parker

Co-Founder and CEO, PillPack

Thanks to Siena Chiang, Elliot Cohen, John Brownlee, and Colin Raney for reading drafts of this post.

Everyday Folks — What If We Didn’t Define Health By Illness? was originally published in The Team at PillPack on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On April 30, 2016, Express Scripts, the largest PBM in the United States, will remove PillPack from its pharmacy network. This business decision will dramatically impact the way thousands of Americans receive and manage the daily medications they need to stay healthy.

This is how large corporations manipulate consumer choice. This is how healthcare stays broken.

How it all started

I grew up in pharmacy. My dad’s a pharmacist, and when I was a kid he ran your traditional mom-and-pop pharmacy in Concord, New Hampshire. One of the first jobs I had growing up was delivering medications for my dad.

A customer I used to deliver to, Ellen, was an elderly woman with frail hands and severe glaucoma. Her vision was so poor that she couldn’t read the print on the prescription bottles I delivered to her every week.

It was incredibly important for her to take the right meds at the right time. But it was almost impossible. She had ten different bottles on the counter that all looked exactly the same.

To help Ellen take her meds, we devised a plan. I’d take a Sharpie and write across the front of the bottle the first letter of the medication. M for Metoprolol, S for Simvastatin, and on. That little hack helped Ellen a lot, and she was always happy to see me — telling me all about how bowling went (with bumpers up) as I scribbled on her pill bottles.

Later that fall I shipped off to the first year of pharmacy school. I also became fascinated by design and entrepreneurship. I got involved in the MIT $100k and helped start Hacking Medicine. The whole time I was also learning about pharmacology and the pain of retail pharmacy — both for patients and pharmacy staff. I interned at Target Pharmacy and did my final year rotations, still thinking about my days delivering prescriptions.

It was incredibly clear to me that design and technology could make the pharmacy experience so much better. And if we could do that, it would change the lives of so many people.

PillPack is born

Our goal was simple: design a better pharmacy that makes it easy for the 117 millions Americans that have at least one chronic condition.

Elliot Cohen and I launched PillPack in early 2014. We are now licensed nationwide, have more than 200 people working at PillPack, and we have tens-of-thousands of customers that rely on PillPack to get the medications they need.

I thought if we made pharmacy better for our customers—enabling them to live a better, healthier life—that the system would be supportive. For the exact same price as picking up your prescriptions at a retail pharmacy, PillPack will coordinate everything for you, pre-sort and package your medications, and deliver them to your door. We spend enormous amounts of time as a society talking about delivering better care. That’s exactly what we’re doing.

How healthcare stays broken

Due to our rapid success, Express Scripts, a $45 billion company that controls where more than one-third of Americans can fill their prescriptions, and also happens to own their own mail-order pharmacy, has decided that improving the system is too much a threat to their existing business.

Rather than improving their product and service, Express Scripts has decided that at the end of April, they will block their 85 million members from using PillPack.

The average PillPack customer takes seven prescription medications every day. These are people with Crohn’s Disease, Bipolar Disorder, Alzheimers, HIV, heart failure, COPD, and many other lifelong and life-threatening conditions. Without PillPack, these folks have even more barriers to staying healthy. They will need to manage getting refills from their doctors, driving to the pharmacy, figuring out when to take each medication, and once again return to sorting pills. These customers are real people that rely on PillPack.

A prescription for better care

We have an obligation to fight for the thousands of Express Scripts’ customers who will be immediately impacted by the result of this decision. We’ve shared many of their stories here.

The only way that healthcare will ever get better in this country is by allowing new and innovative solutions to thrive. If we allow massive corporations to defend antiquated services through market manipulation and anticompetitive power, we all lose.

Our customers need your help letting Express Scripts know that prioritizing their own interests over people’s health and well-being is unacceptable.

Please share this article and visit fixpharmacy.com to find out how you can get involved.

-TJ Parker

Co-Founder and CEO, PillPack

A Prescription for Better Care was originally published in The Team at PillPack on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.