Everside Health, a national direct-to-employer primary care provider, is launching a new prescription solution service for customers.
Everside Health offers primary care, including mental and occupational health, virtually and onsite or near-site to employers. Its centers are tailored to individualized patient populations. The company operates more than 375 health centers in 34 states, and has 400 clients with a reach of 600,000 patients.
The new program, called TotalRx, aims to broaden affordable access to prescription medications. It will offer Everside clients, which range from large and small employers to labor unions to municipalities, a formulary of about 2,000 generics, brand and specialty drugs. The program touts flexible distribution channels: on-site at an Everside Health center, home delivery or select retail pharmacies. It will also make pharmacists available for 1:1 consultations with patients on their medication regimen. Total savings through its program would be $150 annually for patients on prescriptions and 15% annually for employers on medication costs, Everside estimates.
“With the U.S. spending more than $1,125 per person on prescribed medicines per year, per capita, and with more than three in four adults agreeing that prescription drugs are unaffordable, we knew something had to be done,” Everside CEO Chris Miller said in an announcement. “We created TotalRx as a holistic, affordable solution that improves patient health by making medication adherence easier at every stage of the process.”
TotalRx is based on the lowest net cost of a drug as opposed to the average wholesale price, a common approach long criticized for keeping drug costs artificially high. And employers will only be billed when a medication is dispensed, not when it has been stocked in a health center.
In the past, Everside offered a smaller formulary of generics, focused on high health risk and disease management, along with some acute and episodic offerings, Everside Executive Vice President Susan Kinzler told Fierce Healthcare. But clients had been asking for help managing escalating medication costs. The new expanded formulary was developed with input from Everside’s physicians' group, regional medical directors and pharmacists and aims to cover the most commonly used drugs. Flexible distribution channels are also a new feature the company hopes will further expand access.
“We needed to be able to get medications in the hands of the patients in the way that they want to receive their care,” Kinzler said.
The solution is not meant to fully replace pharmacy benefit managers, Kinzler noted, but to offer savings on some drugs. When approaching clients, “we’re not asking them to spend any more money,” Kinzler said. “What we're saying is, you’re spending money on these medications right now through a different model.”