GoodRx is #16 in the CNBC Disruptor List for June 2020
Purpose: a marketplace for affordable and convenient health care, in particular with pharmacy refills.
Recently, they also added HeyDoctor by GoodRx – for telemedicine, which adds another product line to their business. Through this platform, GoodRx offers $20 family care physician checkups online.
The company connects 17M consumers with 70K pharmacies. That means they connect to all pharmacies! As per Wikipedia there are 67K pharmacies in 2017. US Data.Gov lists an equivalent number at https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/pharmacies. As of March 2020, the number of independent pharmacies are on the rise – see here. Plus the study quotes that the total number of pharmacies reached about 71K peak n 2016 after which there has been a decline. Nonetheless, GoodRx connecting to 70K pharmacies is impressive. I wonder how they connect in to the pharmacies (separate drill down required).
On the consumer front, GoodRx has acquired 17M consumers over the past 10 years since their start in 2011. Any acquisition of paying customers without the social chatter of facebook is hard. Acquiring millions of consumers means that is awesome. I wonder if the 80% discount offer makes t appealing for the consumers to search and use GoodRx. Or is it the channel development wherein GoodRx distributes through insurance and other schemes. GoodRx makes revenue from advertisements which is another way they can afford to keep drug prices lower. Plus there is a monthly subscription offer at $5.99 called GoodRx Gold. I wonder if GoodRx also gets commissions from the pharmacy benefits managers and sometimes from the pharmacies as well.
Christina Farr writes about healthcare and startups. In her CNBC article, she indicates that Americans on average spend about $1,200 per year in prescription drugs. Marketing to uninsured and underinsured (often with high deductible plans), GoodRx goes after customers in need. Recently there has been more competitors including SimpleCare, RxSaver, etc. As per CNBC, GoodRx says since its founding it has saved Americans over $20 billion. That means they saved on an average of about $1,100 per consumer. That means they are not just dealing with simple prescription refill, but more likely with the refits for chronic patients and severely ill patients.
As is the norm, the founders Hirsh and Bezdek were discouraged from entering the healthcare space. Often the reason cited is that it is a complicated space. Fortunately for Hirsch and Bezdek they committed and continued to probe deeper. Initially they started with scrapping websites to get price information before working on ways to get data from partnerships. Now they have many relationships to benefit from and have parlayed it to benefit the consumers.
In a way, GoodRx has disrupted the opaque nature of drug pricing to bring a better product and experience for consumers.
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