Demonstrable, Quantifiable Results: SRX’s Technology Platform Integrates all the Complex Data with Diverse Pharmacy Spend Practice Areas to Simplify Pharmacy Management

SRX, a technology company, enables skilled nursing and long-term care (LTC) facilities to address the complexity involved in managing pharmacy spend. The company’s data-driven, automated solution allows customers to identify the maximum number of eligible rebates and identify opportunities for significant savings and waste reduction. Needless to say, SRX was founded with a vision of bringing automation and technology into the LTC industry. It serves clients across the United States.

SRX was established in 2015 and is headquartered in Valley Stream, NY.

The Silicon Review reached out to SRX headquarters and spoke to Scott Taylor, founding principal and CEO of SRX, who highlighted how the company is making a difference in this segment and plans to stay at the forefront. Below is an excerpt.

Interview Highlights

Q. What inspired the creation of SRX? And how did the company continue to adapt over the years?

We saw an opportunity to put technology to use to help facilities with their pharmacy management and drug costs, which make up one of the greatest cost centers in running a long-term care facility.

Over the years, we have introduced new services to help skilled nursing and long-term care facilities better manage their relationships with pharmacy partners and reduce their net operating costs. Whenever we see an opportunity for automation or technology to help with a particularly painful or time-consuming workflow, we start looking at developing a solution.

Most recently, for example, we introduced a service to help facilities identify drug exclusions for managed care contracts. The amount of time and intentional complexity required to do this manually was prohibitive to the vast majority of facilities. This allows them to invoice plans for the exclusions, driving reimbursement higher and saving them a tremendous amount of money—including staff hours. We also inform care providers on cost-saving medications that still deliver patients great treatment.

Q. How does the SRX-built technology platform enable skilled nursing and long-term care facilities? And what does the company intend to achieve by enabling these facilities?

Our platforms deliver facilities easy-to-read data that helps them identify opportunities to lower their drug costs and frees up a lot of bandwidth for their billing officers and upper management. A lot of processes that are deemed unviable, due to the amount of time required to manually go through certain paperwork or databases, are replaced by our automation. Identifying and submitting drug rebates is one such example with tremendous impact. SRX’s software also automates drug rebate submissions, so all the operators have to do is collect a check each quarter and let the software do its work.

Our overarching mission is to help those who serve residents at long-term care facilities. Anything we can do to help these facilities operate more efficiently has a direct impact on the quality of care their residents receive. Since the majority of funding for this care is tied to Medicare and Medicaid, the operating margins are quite thin. By enabling facilities to save more money, they can invest in the people or equipment that delivers the best care possible. We’re a technology company, but our primary focus is people and helping LTC residents get the care they deserve.

Q. What can you tell us about your reconciliation and reporting tools? And how do they identify discrepancies and improve efficiencies?

We use technology to adjudicate bills at our customers’ partner pharmacies, tracking exactly what is being dispensed and billed against established rules and contract terms. When something outside of those rules is billed or dispensed, it triggers an alert that notifies both the facility and pharmacy.

This helps prevent errors and discrepancies quickly and eliminates time on the back-end spent chasing credits, time on calls, or following up on correspondences. Automating this analysis in real-time creates tremendous trust between facilities and their pharmacies since everything is transparent. Everyone sees what is being billed and which errors were resolved or need attention.

On the reporting side, our dashboards provide real-time data and reporting so our customers know exactly what is happening at any given facility around their drug spend. This includes insight into over-the-counter drug usage, credit and return opportunities, split bill opportunities, and waste. This level of insight isn’t available anywhere else and allows operators to make informed decisions that lower drug costs.

Q. What strategies are in place to encourage innovation in your company?

First and foremost, we listen when people or customers have new ideas. Innovation begins with the teams of talented people we have, specialists in their fields, who are motivated to speak up and offer their input on anything. If we have a new problem to solve, it’s often surprising where some of the best ideas come from—sometimes not the person with technical expertise who lives and breathes this issue, but someone with an outside perspective.

Looking at things from a hundred different angles is the best way to find that innovative solution, and that’s how listening to our people helps SRX continue to innovate. Additionally, our customers rely on us as trusted partners. When they have issues and challenges, or suggestions for innovations that would help them better manage drug costs, they come to us first, knowing we welcome the opportunity to develop new products and solutions.

Q. How skilled is the SRX team of experts? And how do they bring value to the company?

We have dozens of experts who came to SRX from the pharmaceutical industry and are invaluable advisors to our customers, helping them make sense of complicated agreements and terms. Our experts are pivotal in helping our customers negotiate better terms because they know how these processes work. They know what our customers should be asking and what a good and fair agreement looks like. When things aren’t going right, they have the vocabulary and acumen to correct things and come to a resolution everyone can agree on.

Our software developers are the most talented in the industry, perhaps in healthcare in general. They have helped us bring our vision to reality and are consistently updating our services and capabilities based on internal feedback and comments from our customers. As with most things in tech, it’s an ongoing process of improving the experience for our customers and fixing issues. Our developers work quickly, but carefully. Long-term care isn’t an industry where we can afford to wait weeks for a piece of malfunctioning software to be fixed. It has to happen quickly so facilities can maintain workflows, remain compliant, and keep up with the care needs of their residents.

Q. Can you provide us with one or two success stories describing the challenges your clients faced and how your solutions helped them overcome those challenges?

When we approached one of our most recent customers about SRX’s services, they just wouldn’t believe the kinds of savings we could deliver them. After talking more and describing what other facilities have been saving with SRX, we set up a demo for their facilities. Many long-term care operators don’t know they’re missing out on substantial savings on their drug costs.
We demonstrated that by identifying drug rebates, they would be saving something in the order of a hundred thousand dollars each year on their drug costs. After we delivered the first rebate check, they reached out to say it couldn’t have come at a more crucial time and alleviated the tight margins they had been operating on.

Another customer worked with our advisors to audit their pharmacy bills. We worked together for a few weeks and quickly started identifying discrepancies and lost credits that added up. We worked with the client’s pharmacy partner to establish new rules and terms, making the relationship a lot more transparent and restoring trust. Over the next few months, this facility saw the results of working with SRX: fewer billing errors, more savings, and a much more open and communicative relationship with their pharmacy partner.

Q. What do you think are the biggest challenges your industry will face in the next five years? And how do you plan to counter those challenges?

The knock-on effects of the pandemic are likely to be felt for several years to come. Most experts don’t see the supply chain issue clearing up in the next year, for example. That has a major impact on our partners in long-term care. Once you add the near-historic inflation to high costs being propped up due to supply issues, it’s a real maelstrom for facility operators. New legislation and regulations are always an underlying risk. Changes to payment models, reductions in payments, or new requirements around staffing or care delivery expectations, for instance, can either increase or decrease the strain on operators.

Fortunately, we believe there will continue to be ongoing innovation from companies like SRX. Because our focus is on cost savings, our technology and experts serve as a buffer against legislation that negatively impacts operators.

Additionally, we are proud advocates for our partners in long-term care and are passionate about getting fair legislation passed that helps facilities deliver great care, as opposed to punishing those who are under-funded and falling behind. Our nation’s most vulnerable people depend on long-term care facilities to serve their care needs. We won’t give up our promise to help them and those that provide for them.

Q. About the future, where do you see SRX a couple of years from now?

We see the long-term care industry as a whole continuing to adopt more technologically forward solutions and see SRX as an instrumental part of that. We’re already seeing greater adoption of technologies that help facilities hire staff quicker or manage their pool of internal staff across multiple facilities within the same network. On the care side of things, there are major advancements in technologies that are assisting long-term care facilities in monitoring patients remotely.

For SRX, we see a future where our technology is in every facility in the nation. We believe all operators can benefit from uncovering savings they are rightfully owed. The source of funding for long-term care facilities is constantly in flux and most recently the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services proposed an over four percent funding cut that’s going to dramatically impact our customers. In the future, who can say what their funding will look like. What we can say is that SRX’s services help our customers navigate these issues with more financial freedom, not to worry about operating at a loss, and focus on the delivery of care.

Scott Taylor | Founding Principal & CEO

Scott is an investor and entrepreneur and has worked to build and grow several 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.

“Our overarching mission is to help those who serve residents at long-term care facilities. Anything we can do to help these facilities operate more efficiently has a direct impact on the quality of care their residents receive.”

“We use technology to adjudicate bills at our customers’ partner pharmacies, tracking exactly what is being dispensed and billed against established rules and contract terms. When something outside of those rules is billed or dispensed, it triggers an alert that notifies both the facility and pharmacy.”