GoodRx promotes itself as a company that allows you to compare drug prices and find coupons at over 60,000 pharmacies across the country, but actually, most pharmacists hate it. When they say compare prescription drug prices, they mean the cost of a prescription if you aren’t using insurance. And advertising? Uh, no.
GoodRx makes money in two main ways: Advertisements on their site and a percentage fee every time a GoodRx coupon is used at the pharmacy. Supossidly Good Rx has “relationships” with most top pharma companies, but that relationship may be to say “hello.”
It’s not a coupon
GoodRx calls it a “coupon,n” just like it’s a barcode that’s scanned at the register. They even show a commercial suggesting that’s how it works and that it takes only seconds. It doesn’t work that way. Pharmacists have to reverse the billing they have done, enter the information like an insurance card, rebill, and print new paperwork. It’s incredibly tedious and time-consuming, especially when people are in line at the register.
They’re collecting personal health information.
When you use GoodRx, you’re trading your personal and private health information for what amounts to a few bucks in savings for almost all transactions. Do you want your employer, or your insurance company, or anyone else to know you’re on anti-depressants, HIV medication, Viagra, or that you regularly get medicine for genital warts? When you use GoodRx, ALL that data regarding your prescription transaction is collected and stored. GoodRx employs people to dig into it analyze it. And they use and sell that data. At one time, they printed on their website that they consider your data an asset and if/when they sell their company, YOUR PRIVATE DATA gets sold too.
In addition, GoodRx changes prescription filling from being centered around healthcare to being all about cost. Pharmacists have patients every day more concerned (and in some cases consumed) about whether their prescription was run on GoodRx instead of having any interest in learning how to take the medication and what to look for with side effects.
But what about their advertising?
Good Rx does reach an audience, but in most cases, that audience is NOT who you want to target. It has been my experience, when analyzing pilot programs for clients, that the expense is too high and the ROI too low.
By mapping out where your audience goes online, when they are deciding on your product, you can place ads on strategic websites that provide a better return. In addition, pharmacists have come to hate dispensing medications with Good Rx.
Right now, there’s a lot of investment hype around Food Rx. Please don’t buy into it.