Michael Rea was working as a pharmacist at a Kansas City, Mo., Walgreens (WAG)in 2008, when an elderly customer came to him with a dire situation: The co-pays on her monthly prescription costs were making it hard for her to afford her mortgage payments. When Rea crunched the numbers, he says, he was able to save the patient $250 a month by choosing cheaper drugs and shopping at pharmacies that offered better deals.
The patient kept her house, and Rea launched Rx Savings Solutions to extend the service to others. Last month, Rea says the Olathe (Kansas)-based company won a contract to pare prescription costs for employees of the state of Kansas. Between that deal and work for other employers, Rea expects Rx Savings to serve 250,000 people in 2014—enough for the 14-employee company to be profitable this year.
Rx Savings takes advantage of pricing practices that result in prescription costs that vary widely among different pharmacies. For example, Consumer Reportspublished research last year showing that the cost of a month’s supply of generic Lipitor, used to lower cholesterol, varied from $17 to $150, depending on the pharmacy. “The idea of saving money isn’t novel,” says Rea, but pharmacists are generally too busy to parse pricing data for patients individually.
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