What You Should Know:
Free Market Health, a Pittsburgh-based healthcare technology company transforming the specialty pharmacy ecosystem with a care-driven marketplace platform, today announced its $13.5M in Series A financing led by Alta Partners and with participation from existing investors Highmark Ventures and 653 Investment Partners.
– The capital will enable the company’s team of specialty pharmacy industry experts to scale beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars in specialty medication spend already managed by the platform.
Challenges Getting Specialty Medication Authorized by Payers
The process to get a specialty medication authorized by a payer, to the right pharmacy, and in the hands of a patient should be a simple process. However, misdirected interactions, process missteps and misaligned incentives cause multiweek delays in medication access, a burden that wastes resources, generates confusion and ultimately fails patients. To resolve this, Free Market Health was founded in 2019 to support forward-thinking payers and specialty pharmacies of all sizes who need to operate in a complex and opaque market. The company empowers all stakeholders to optimize resources and maximize opportunities while focusing on the most important stakeholder of all: the patient.
Care-Driven Marketplace Empowering Specialty Pharmacies & Payers
Free Market Health’s cloud-based marketplace platform complements and augments a payer’s existing processes and vendors to facilitate the timely match of specialty medication referral and pharmacy while balancing the cost and value of care. While maintaining a low profile through its first year of launch, the company has been laser-focused on executing its value proposition for all its stakeholders. With Free Market Health, payers are enabling a seamless match to best-fit pharmacies, systematically managing continuity of care when appropriate, and transparently generating meaningful savings. Specialty pharmacies of all types and sizes are gaining fair, easy access to payer-authorized specialty medication referrals that may match their care and business model. And patients are receiving optimized care from accountable specialty pharmacies capable of meeting their needs.
“From delays in prior authorization requests to uncertainty on the best-fit specialty pharmacy and medication pricing variability, the existing specialty pharmacy ecosystem fails to do what it’s meant to do: efficiently deliver lifesaving and life-altering medications into the hands of patients,” said Joe Cardosi, founder and chief executive officer of Free Market Health. “Our mission is to ensure the specialty medication referral and reimbursement process never fails the patient, and we’re thrilled to have support from innovative and passionate investors like Alta Partners, Highmark Ventures and 653 Investment Partners.”
Achieving 36% Reduction in Medication Abandonment of Payer-Authorized Referrals
With a year of full-scale operating under its belt, the care-driven marketplace platform has facilitated a seamless match of thousands of specialty medication referrals and has hundreds of millions of dollars in specialty medication spending under management. Most importantly, patients are benefitting from a better-orchestrated process that’s leading to better patient outcomes, as demonstrated by the company’s 36 percent reduction in medication abandonment of payer-authorized referrals.
Officially launching the platform in early 2021, Free Market Health’s team has tripled over the past year to serve a growing payer client base and a national, high-quality specialty pharmacy network, with multiple large, national payers and new specialty pharmacies expected to onboard before the year end.
