Free Market Health announced a partnership with Prime Therapeutics to launch Pharmacy Match, which uses Free Market's cloud-based technology platform to manage the specialty drug market.
"We're a company that wants to differentiate against the status quo," Free Market CEO Joe Cardosi said. "As you're a startup and you want to grow, you have to find the right partners that are forward thinking and are interested in making changes that are not just meaningful for themselves but meaningful for the stakeholders that they're looking to serve."
Free Market's platform connects insurance providers with specialty pharmacies. Prime Therapeutics is a pharmacy benefit management company that manages more than 30 million people. According to Prime Therapeutics, Pharmacy Match is "designed to drive competition through an expanded specialty pharmacy network and to lower drug costs for plan sponsors."
"To help create a frictionless experience, the real-time referral feature comparison shops the market and helps ensure members’ specialty medications are provided by the specialty pharmacy best suited to meet their needs," Prime Therapeutics said in its release describing the function of Pharmacy Match.
Despite being a business-to-business company, benefiting patients is "still the mission" of Free Market.
"Our ultimate goal at Free Market Health is to get as many opportunities to get a referral from a payor connected out to a high quality pharmacy," Cardosi said. "We think that when it's in our ecosystem, we're going to work our butts off to make sure that it goes really smoothly and that the patients get started on a life saving, life changing medication as quickly as possible from a high quality care provider."
Free Market Health has seen notable growth in the past several months. It closed a $20 million Series B round in November and moved to larger office spaces in April. But in that time. specialty drugs have continued to grow more expensive. This is due to a variety of factors, including issues surrounding price transparency. Cardosi said that "the drug supply chain in the United States is quite complex" and that "inherent in that complexity is just a level of opaqueness."
"What we want to do as a technology enablement partner for all the key players in this specialty drug ecosystem is make sure we can help orchestrate the process as efficiently as possible so that when a patient finds out they need to be started on a specialty drug and we're involved, that's going to happen as efficiently as possible," Cardosi said. "We have a lot to execute and that's exciting. I think this Prime Therapeutics opportunity presents a great opportunity for us to execute as a company and to continue to prove this model and deliver value for the partners that we have and the new partners that we're going to get."
