Free Market Health, a technology company focused on specialty drugs, has acquired Beeline Rx, another company in the specialty drug space, it announced on Tuesday.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Free Market Health offers payers, including Highmark, access to a marketplace of specialty pharmacies of all sizes. The payers are able to choose which specialty pharmacies in this marketplace they want to have in their network. Then when members are prescribed a specialty drug, Free Market Health is able to connect that member to the best-fit pharmacy within their health plan’s network.
This compares to the traditional way payers manage specialty drugs, which is through exclusive relationships with one single specialty pharmacy.
Now with the acquisition of Beeline Rx, Free Market Health is hoping to further streamline the specialty pharmacy space, particularly around prior authorization. Because specialty drugs are so expensive, payer approval is typically required for the patients to access the medications. However, prior authorization often leads to delays for patients.
Beeline Rx, meanwhile, offers a platform to make this prior authorization process more efficient. It integrates with electronic health records and provides access to 320 million patient medical charts. It also helps coordinate between prescribers and specialty pharmacies and provides access to medical policy and coverage guidelines. Free Market Health will be integrating this technology into its own platform.
“What [Beeline Rx] built is all around the facilitation of prior auth and modernizing the approach, leveraging data interoperability and really practical use cases of AI. … Incorporating their technology into our care-driven marketplace platform is all about delivering on the enhanced member experience. In this instance, it’s kind of supercharging some of the intake capabilities that Free Market Health already has,” said Joe Cardosi, founder and CEO of Free Market Health, in an interview.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Beeline Rx’s co-founder and CEO, Steve Fleck, will be joining Free Market Health as chief strategy officer, while co-founder and president Josh Cordle will be chief product officer, and co-founder and COO David Palmer will be senior vice president of operations.
“Beeline Rx is committed to putting the patient first—a commitment we proudly share with the [Free Market Health] team,” Fleck said in a statement. “We couldn’t be more excited to join forces, building innovative technology together to ensure the specialty pharmacy ecosystem is accountable to the patients who depend on it.”
The acquisition comes as the cost of specialty drugs is skyrocketing — they currently account for more than half of the total drug spend. While Cardosi doesn’t expect the specialty drug space to get less complicated, he thinks tech solutions like Free Market Health and Beeline Rx will be able to help support the space.
“I think a modern technology company that’s aligning stakeholders, bringing the stakeholders closer together, ultimately serving the patient is going to be a critical piece of harnessing some of that, managing some of that complexity and fragmentation,” he said.
Another company in the specialty drug space is Waltz Health, which offers a platform that connects health plan members to the specialty pharmacy that best suits their needs.
Read the story in MedCityNews.