CIO Bulletin

Our technology automates examination of your monthly pharmacy bill to identify cost savings and opportunities for waste management: SRX

Technology has made pharmacies more efficient in dealing with patients' medications and quickly accessing medical and patient information. Apart from the pharmacies, technological innovations have also increased the ability of health care providers to better understand and manage their pharmacy costs.

SRX originated in 2015 by a group of professionals saw an opportunity to use technology and automation in managing pharmacy bills for skilled nursing and long-term care (LTC) operators. The company continues to innovate solutions for the LTC and post-acute care industry and provide solutions that reduce drug costs and add value.

Scott Taylor, Founding Principal and CEO discusses the journey of SRX

Q. What makes SRX and its services relevant in today’s times? Could you give us some context?

Even without the recent COVID-19 pandemic, long-term care is an industry where reimbursements are closely tied to government entities, namely Medicare and Medicaid. This means the majority of long-term care facilities are operating with tight margins and relatively fixed incomes. What SRX does for these facilities is free up resources by lowering their drug costs—a major cost center—so our partners can invest in upgrading their technologies, offering additional care services, or hiring skilled providers to care for their residents.

Q. What does innovation mean to SRX?

Seeing opportunities to take arduous work off administrators’ hands through the development of technological processes is how we define innovation. Whenever we can find a way to free up human intelligence and brainpower to tackle meaningful tasks by replacing a repetitive or complex process with automation, or reducing that workload, that is innovation. We have specialists with a variety of backgrounds and expertise so our partners don’t have to worry about training in-house resources for an incredibly complex task they would never have the time to fully master. Innovation at SRX is applying the best solution to the task at hand, reducing complexity, and improving transparency.

Q. Could you tell us about your services?

SRX combines technology and expert advisors to help long-term care operators lower their drug costs and improve their pharmacy management practices. When looking at ways to improve the long-term care industry, we saw that pharmacy management was one area that was particularly complex for facilities. That complexity created a lot of room for errors, pharmacy contract and price discrepancies, and waste. Our services make managing pharmacy relationships more transparent and efficient for LTC facilities and save them significant amounts of money by streamlining practices and identifying or preventing discrepancies.

Q. What allows SRX to stay focused on the client?

Our success as a business is rooted in the success of our customers. Fundamentally, we are here to help all operators lower their costs, resulting in improved care for their residents and patients. If we can get better outcomes for our customers, we benefit by getting referrals.

Often, when we approach prospects, they’re unaware of many of the issues we solve for. There’s a lot of complexity in managing a long-term care facility’s pharmacy costs, and some think it’s expensive and that’s just how it is. But when we take a closer look, we can show our customers all these areas where they are entitled to extra refunds or rebates, or highlight discrepancies and waste. So, the better we can make our solutions at helping our customers save more, the more we can grow and make a difference across the industry.

Q. Could you tell us about the work culture at SRX?

Our focus at SRX is empowering every member to make contributions wherever they can. If someone has an idea about how a process can be improved, or a piece of code that can simplify some task, we listen. That’s the heart of how we innovate at SRX. It begins with teams of talented and experienced individuals—they’re basically superheroes to us—coming together and throwing out ideas until something truly great sticks. It’s a culture of openness and appreciation, of striving to achieve great results for our customers, and making an impact on the industry at large.

Q. What changes did SRX make to adapt to the pandemic?

As a technology company, it was easy for us to pivot to remote work, and our team truly pulled together to make sure our own success extended to our customers. We were able to both adapt and innovate, developing a communication technology that addressed a very specific CMS reporting requirement. We also built out a vaccine program that provided operators with favorable pricing so their residents were able to get flu vaccines at a critical time. We really pride ourselves on continually innovating technology and drug cost solutions that respond to major pain points for operators.

Q. Tell us about the importance of partnerships in the growth of your company.

Partnerships have been pivotal to our growth. In our earliest days, we reached out to many industry leaders to find out how partnering with them could benefit the services we offer our clients and found quick friends with some giants in long-term care and health care more generally. Among them are McKesson, MatrixCare, and the American Health Care Association.

Q. What's the company's vision for the near future?

Getting the word out to our customers and the industry around our solutions, combined with positioning ourselves as a comprehensive solution for all industry-related drug costs is where our focus will be near-term. There is a lot of work to be done in continuing to support industry partners as we come through this pandemic. The impact of potential regulatory changes could negatively impact operators if there isn’t accompanying financial support needed to implement changes. In addition to offering drug cost solutions that truly impact the bottom line, we see ourselves as industry advocates who can play a role through our membership with the American Health Care Association (AHCA), or through other efforts including our co-founding and support of the Synergy Summit. This annual event provides owners and C-level executives in long-term care with the opportunity to attend impactful educational sessions around trends, best practices and innovations.

Q. Are you planning on rolling out any new services?

Most recently, we have adapted our technology to identifying Managed Care exclusions that put money back in facilities. Identifying these exclusions manually is incredibly complicated and time-consuming, so we are extending our philosophy of enhancing processes through the power of our software into a payer model that is gaining popularity in long-term care.

Before the pandemic hit, we heard from a lot of different long-term care operators asking for a solution to employee prescription benefits plans they were spending millions of dollars on each year. They saw that we had the ability to save them tremendous amounts of money with their drug costs and thought we could help out here. During the pandemic, we had this great opportunity with one of the largest pharmacy networks in the country and decided to pursue it. What came out of that was Arc. Arc is an employee prescriptions benefits program we are rolling out that combines our intelligent software with unique pharmacy channels to save employers significant amounts of money on their benefits programs, while maintaining customizable and robust plans that employees can depend on.

Meet Scott Taylor

Scott Taylor is an investor and entrepreneur and has worked to build and grow a number of other healthcare-related businesses, including co-founding a portable diagnostic company serving the post-acute market, and operating and investing in a pharmacy benefit management business. Prior to his involvement in the healthcare industry, Scott was an accomplished executive in the financial services industry. He holds an AB degree in Economics from Harvard University.