For independent pharmacists, it’s rarely just about the software. Many pharmacists have built their business using PioneerRx, QS/1, or BestRx, and with that comes an expectation: that your technology partner will have your back while continuing to protect your future.
In a recent Beyond the Scripts podcast, RedSail Technologies CEO Andy Mauer and President of Pharmacy Systems Josh Howland spoke openly about the questions many independent pharmacists have—about RedSail, about private equity, and about what comes next.
It’s no secret that the words "private equity" can set off alarms: stories about companies being gutted, services cut, prices raised. But as Andy explains, private equity is a big bucket:
“Private equity is a huge category, and there's all sorts of different types of private equity organizations, private equity firms that do a variety of different things. I think the ones that give the category a bad rap are those that come in and buy a business and gut it and offshore everything and squeeze every nickel out of it. And then there's, on the opposite side of the spectrum, the growth investor private equity, where they're looking to deploy additional dollars behind the business to help it to expand, reach new markets, to offer new capabilities, etc. And then there's everything in between. It's a spectrum.”
He continued, “I've only worked with growth investor private equity. I've never worked with one of the chop shops. And I frankly have no interest in working with one of them. But at the end of the day, good private equity investors are really a very helpful partner with a business like RedSail."
Most industry watchers agree that the future doesn’t belong to pharmacies that simply fill prescriptions. In accordance with the industry, RedSail has chosen to invest in tools that help pharmacists focus on clinical care and also in partnerships, including with pharma manufacturers, that bring additional funds into the independent pharmacy ecosystem. The aim is to build a technical and relationship infrastructure that gives independents leverage against corporate chains and middlemen.
One of these initiatives, maybe most familiar to customers as “care goal programs,” supports easy identification of patients who may need an intervention—because they’ve lapsed on their prescription or could benefit from a vaccine, for example. These free adherence-boosting programs are designed to deliver tangible benefits to the pharmacy, including additional revenue.
Josh explains, “What we want to be able to do is put enough of those things that matter in front of the pharmacist to take action on. Remember, pharma has anti-kickback regulations; that's a regulated part. They have to be very careful about what they can pay for. But they want to be able to move a pharmacist. The goal is to sell the right drug to the right person. They want to be able to pay people to do that. And those are the types of avenues that we build to get people in the habit, when you see this alert, you take an action, and those types of actions can drive positive revenue.”
The investment backing RedSail has also made it possible to maintain a strong focus on the PMS platforms while building up new, additional solutions (think $30 million toward development of LTC’s next-generation platform, Axys LTC.) The past few years have also brought advanced capabilities to PowerLine, the only pharmacy switch independent of a distributor or PBM and a real lifeline following last year’s Change Healthcare incident.
Along with investments in PMS and PowerLine, we’ve invested in new programs like RxAdvantage automated copay vouchers and RxCash+, AI-powered cash pricing optimization to lift store revenue in the growing cash-pay category (and save a ton of manual time). Many of the new solutions come with personal analytics dashboards for pharmacies that illustrate program impact via script volumes and patient trends.
And then there’s RedSail Pay, a new solution for credit card processing that’s integrated with the PMSs and has lower fees.
As Andy says, “The message to the market and the message to all of our customers is, no matter what rates you're paying, no matter who your credit card vendor is, we will lower it. And that is direct savings to your pharmacy and your organization, and it helps to further that mission of what I talked about earlier. We're investing in the business in ways that the pharmacy wins.”
Andy says there’s more to come: “Something that's emerged and continues to grow is how often PBMs are partnering with discount cards. And they're automatically shunting prescriptions from the normal adjudication process to a discount card. And then of course, there's a negative rebate to the pharmacy.”
He continues, “Of course our pharmacies don't like that for obvious reasons. It's nonsense. And one of the things that we are developing is the capability for customers that want to auto-reverse those and rebill them as cash. And it doesn't change the price paid by the patient, but it eliminates negative rebate. And we'll be launching that.”
Looking at the impact of all these investments as a whole, Andy sums up: "A healthy, growing RedSail needs a healthy, growing independent pharmacy community."
Howland agrees. “That’s important and frankly the reason why most of us are here, right? We believe in independent pharmacy, and we believe in the practice of pharmacy. And we're very cognizant, at the end of the day, our customers need to be healthy for us to be healthy, and they need to have patients for them to be healthy. It's a nice case of everybody having aligned incentives. And I think that was super important, what Andy just said about not growing at the expense of our customers. Our goal is to grow our value to our customers. And that's what makes us healthy.”
Want to read the whole podcast transcript? Find it here.
Missed Part 1 of the conversation “RedSail Unscripted”? Listen here.
