Electronic Health Reporter

RxREVU, an early-stage company headquartered in Denver, Colorado, announces the release of their medication optimization application programming interface (API) to help patients and payers save money on prescription drugs by providing cost and quality transparency.

“We felt great validation this week as Aetna’s Chairman and CEO, Mark Bertolini, led off the HIMSS14 conference discussing the need to bring cost and quality transparency along with better experiences in the consumer health technology marketplace. This is exactly what RxREVU brings to the table. By giving physicians and patients access to evidence-based quality information with cost data, we will significantly bend the cost curve, provide better quality care and deliver better patient experiences.” says Carm Huntress, RxREVU’s Chief Executive Officer.

The company reduces medication costs with a process they call “medication optimization,” which is based on their unique ability to mine large volumes of peer-reviewed clinical studies and medical journals to compare the effectiveness and cost of one drug against another. Their dataset includes over twelve different ways for people to save money on their medications, which was established by the team’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kevin O’Brien.

Historically, useful comparative-effectiveness data has been nearly impossible to gather from the mountains of clinical data these journals publish. “We’ve found a unique way to deliver cost and quality research to help patients, together with their physicians, make critical decisions about medications when cost is a factor.”

Until recently, physicians have rarely taken cost into account when prescribing medications. With pharmacy benefit prices predicted to grow by as much as 7-10% per year through 2020, consumer out-of-pocket health care costs rising by 6% per year, and critical drugs no longer covered by insurance, talking about cost in the exam room is becoming a necessity.