Just the tip:
So Im in healthcare and get annoyed by all of the patient calls requesting their narcotic prescriptions to be sent to another pharmacy. I bet you’re asking…why cant the pharmacist just transfer the prescription? Thats a great question! Its because they are LAZY! Ok, so not with narcotics. The US government did a knee jerk reaction and now all controlled substances can’t be transferred by master’s or doctorate degree pharmacists…obviously we can’t trust them. Only the master’s degreed or doctorate degreed nurses and doctors can do that. That makes sense. 🙄🙄
So, while this is a pet peeve of mine, its not just narcotics and controlled substances that are the problem. Its ALL medications. We are seeing shortages of all sorts of generic medication across the board from some unknown reason. Narcotics and controlled substances are just the annoying ones because the physicians have to write a brand new prescription each time they move the prescription from place to place. It seems no one thought this through *cought*stupid government*cough*. A doctors sends a prescription over to a pharmacy that is out of stock…so they call it in somewhere else. Then the first pharmacy fills the prescription when they get it in stock and the patient gets a double hookup. I can smell the scam from here with these patients.
So WTH is my solution? A drug checking database. This can’t be that complicated. CVS, Walgreens and all of the other pharmacies have to have some sort of stock keeping system (if they don’t this should be enforced by the government…truly for safety). We need to Zapier CVS and Walgreens and whoever else out there to a central database. When a prescription gets sent electronically (like 90% of the prescriptions do) this should hit the database, see if the drug is available and ONLY IF the drug is available in the correct quantity should the provider be able to prescribe the medication. If there isnt enough, throw a “hell no” message back at them. Or even better, only show the pharmacies that have the medication available to begin with!
Quick off topic:
We forced electronic charting onto healthcare workers…why don’t we utilize it better? Is anyone thinking ahead or did we just get lobbied by the lady from Epic and shove the EHR down everyone’s throat?
Quick Thoughts:
Cost to get started: [$$$$$]This is a FIVE $ ($$,$$$,000) business to get started. I actually think the database and the checking part is fairly simple, ecommerce giants use systems like these all the time. Hell, WALGREENS uses a system like this for their normal inventory. Its going to take some lobbying 😒
Ease of business: [5] – This is a complicated one. The bureaucratic bullshit level will be very high trying to integrate with multiple systems that different pharmaceutical companies use, thus the Zapier method. That being said, someone needs to pull a Epic lady thing and pay off some politicians to shove this down companies throats too. Then they have to use your standard.
How big can this grow: [5] This is a hundreds of millions if not low billion dollar idea. When you force healthcare ($4.5 TRILLION a year business in the US) this is a money maker IF you can pull it off.
Resource level: [5] So the programming side really isn’t that hard. A few offshore developers could easily knock this out in 6 months. That being said, this is probably a US startup requiring talent from the US. Then there’s the lobbying part. This is the complicated part. Please watch the youtube video below. Bill Gurly is the man.
Can I pull it off: [0] I’m decent at ideas… No programming skills…no lobbying skills… No VC friends. So it looks like this one ain’t happening for me.
Why This and Where is It Going?
I think this is a huge market and its an actual necessity. Healthcare is growing exponentially and the baby boomers getting really old is going to tax the system. I don’t think drug manufacturer’s are ready thus we will have shortages of medicines forever. According to Statistica (however the hell you spell it) 2022 had 6.7 BILLLION prescriptions written. Thats up 300 MILLION from 2021. This wont slow down.
So this is a service that will be needed more and more. If we can’t keep up with simple inventory now, how will we in the decades to come. More and more medications are being created. Nationwide inventory control will continue being a parasite on the healthcare system.
Lets Talk Financials:
So this is definitely in the billions range of gross sales. I think this could be a $.50-$1 surcharge on each prescription. Some people would be thrilled to pay this (hell, I bet prescribers would be happy to foot the bill to not have to deal with the nonsense). I personally would be happy to pay $.50/prescription to ensure I can get my medicine and not waste time driving across town for no reason or spend 30 min on the phone with a pharmacy or my doctors office. Let’s drop the numbers to a reasonable $.10/unit. Thats $670M in revenue. Once this is developed, it should be a fairly straight forward cash cow. With all the bureaucratic BS, you force the drug retailers to keep to your API standards (probably REST). This would easily fall in the 50% profit margin or more internet business category. If you can squeeze the government for $.25/prescription (making a $4 30 day supply med $4.25…which is very reasonable) its a $1.675B revenue and almost a billion in profit (I like to round up)
How to Get Started:
So how to get started? VC is the first place to go. You need money to hire a lobbyist and float the idea. I wouldn’t go a step further until you got that part out of the way. You need to find a way to pitch it as 3 things: a patient safety issue, patient satisfaction issue (we know that the government was dumb enough to believe that patient satisfaction scores leads to better patient outcomes) and a way for congresspeople to get paid (and maybe this somehow reduces medical costs by faster treatment, more availability, preventative care, etc).
Once this is floated, you develop the software an force the retailers and EHR companies to bend to your will as they won’t have a choice to comply.
Final Thoughts
I really think this thing can take off. There are a couple obstacles (very large ones) but we have seen the government fall for all of the stupidity already with EHRs, patient satisfaction, wasteful medical billing, etc. I think it would be good to “donate” to some sort of “independent” study by some big name university showing that the lack of medications leads to thousands of preventable deaths. We need a good study to prove the government needs to save more lives or you are killing people if you don’t. So lets recap: Pay for a prestigious university to do a medical study (or maybe some sort of aggregate study of previously published studies) with a positive correlation happy ending for you. Then pay off some congresspeople through lobbyists through political campaigns or cocaine. Once the law looks like its going to pass, hire some junior developers to build some fairly simple software. Profit
