Skip the Pharmacy, Get Prescriptions Delivered to Your Door with ScriptDrop
ScriptDrop solves problems for both pharmacy and consumer
There is a big problem in the pharmacy business. Many patients don’t pick up their prescriptions after the physician has sent them in.
It’s called prescription abandonment. Patients and pharmacies both have a lot to gain by reducing unfilled prescriptions.
In a recent study conducted by CVS Caremark, medication non-adherence cost the entire healthcare system an estimated $290 billion.
“When prescriptions go unfilled, the patient does not get the medicine that the doctor told them to take,” said Nick Potts, CEO of ScriptDrop, a prescription delivery and medicine reminder service that can help pharmacies reduce prescription abandonment.
“Filled but unpurchased prescriptions are also tough on a pharmacy, especially for medicines that are specialized,” said Potts.
“The pharmacy spends time filling the prescription, loses the sale, and then bears the cost of putting the drug back into inventory or, if it was special order, repacking it and shipping it back to the manufacturer,” he said. “There are 4.3 billion prescriptions filled in the U.S. every year. Pharmacies can barely keep up.”
With ScriptDrop, patients and pharmacies can both enjoy free prescription delivery, saving time, money, and increasing the opportunity for patients to take their pills.
Industry knowledge and customer validation give ScriptDrop an edge.
Potts and his co-founder Larry Scott became experts in the pharmacy industry while working for CoverMyMeds. Like many entrepreneurs, in their off hours, they worked together on several other business ideas that didn’t pan out before they began ScriptDrop.
“Those other projects helped us understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses,” Potts said. “We settled on solving the prescription abandonment problem in pharmacy and had enough of the right industry expertise and relationships to get our business grounded and going.”
ScriptDrop works seamlessly with systems the pharmacist already uses.
ScriptDrop can integrate into a pharmacy’s existing workflow and online systems. There is no need for the pharmacy or the patient to download an app. Pharmacists don’t have to change their process with ScriptDrop. There’s no retraining required.
“We are set up similar to a healthcare plan,” said Potts. “Pharmacists merely bill the same BIN number just like they already do hundreds of times a day. There’s no need to reenter data. We have a contract with a major clearinghouse for the pharmacy industry to carry data from ScriptDrop to the pharmacy and from the pharmacy back to ScriptDrop.
The ScriptDrop delivery service is standardized for all pharmacies. The company had built out a courier network with access to more than 250 courier companies in the U.S.
When the meds are delivered, the patient e-signs an acknowledgment of delivery via a one-time access link sent to the courier. The patient can charge the co-pay at the point of delivery as well.
“ScriptDrop can cut the entire process of filling a prescription from about five minutes to less than 30 seconds. That’s huge if you own thousands of pharmacies,” Potts said. “Every second we save turns into millions of dollars of reduced opportunity cost.”
Patients win with ScriptDrop
As for patients, they receive the medications they need without making a trip to the pharmacy.
ScriptDrop started last May. “We’ve gone far in less than a year,” Potts said. “There were some things we didn’t know on the features side, but we didn’t spin our wheels. We talked to pharmacists.
Eventually, Potts said, that ScriptDrop hopes to move its solution further upstream, with prescribing doctors submitting the prescriptions to be filled and delivered at the same time.
“One thing that surprised me,” he said, “is that larger companies will take startups seriously. They will take a chance on you if you fill a need or solve a problem. One of our first customers is a multi-billion company. No matter what your size, if you solve someone’s pain, they will listen.”
