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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Doug Hirsch, the co-founder and chief mission officer of GoodRx, which helps patients access drug discounts and save money on prescriptions.
Hirsch spoke with Healthcare Brew about how GoodRx views companies like Amazon and Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs Company—both of which are looking to shape up the prescription drug savings sector. He also discussed how artificial intelligence (AI) could affect the future of healthcare.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about yourself and your work at GoodRx.
We started the company way back in 2011 and continue to champion the company to anybody who will listen. Our core mission is helping people find the care that they deserve, and getting affordable and convenient healthcare to all Americans.
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
People get really confused about healthcare. I’m constantly asked about companies that are quasi-competitors of ours that aren’t really competitive. Since the day we started this company, the competition really is people who just think they understand how healthcare works. People get a job and they say, “Hey, do you have benefits?” And the company says, “Sure.” And that’s the end of the conversation. But that’s by no means, these days, the end of the conversation. It becomes a question of what’s covered and what’s not.
I’m asked every other day whether Amazon is going to crush GoodRx, or whether some upstart—Mark Cuban or any other company—is going to change what we do. But in practice, I spend most of my job just trying to think about the average consumer and how to show them a better way. People think it’s a lot of negotiations with pharmacies—people on the golf course or something—when honestly, I’m sitting on my phone, or standing at a pharmacy, or standing in a doctor’s office and listening and learning.
What healthcare trend are you most optimistic about and why?
I’m really, really excited about AI. I’m thinking more about this episodic or non-existent relationship that patients have to the US healthcare system and if we can make that deeper and more frequent. I believe we can use AI to just make a more fluid, dynamic, accessible, and affordable healthcare system.
What healthcare trend are you least optimistic about and why?
Government intervention. Not that it’s bad—I’m all for transparency. We started GoodRx before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) came into effect. Everyone told me that I was out of a job because the ACA was going to solve US healthcare. Every time these bills come up, people tell me it’s going to change the world, and yet I’ve heard 13+ years of big talk and not seen a lot of action to actually make care more affordable and better. For all the theoretical legislation that’s come and gone or been signed or not, we’re in a worse place now than we were 12 years ago. I don’t see anything on the horizon that’s really going to change that.