Raj Beri has served as the chief operating officer at Santa Monica-based GoodRx since May. The digital health care company designs technology to help people find prescriptions at affordable prices.
What is your role at GoodRx and what are your main responsibilities?
As chief operating officer, I oversee our core operations as well as our product, tech and marketing functions. I often liken my role to being “Chief Blocker and Tackler.” I’m responsible for the day-to-day oversight of many of our businesses and making sure all of our various teams are working together towards the same goal. GoodRx is unique because we have so many talented
people working here that come from a variety of backgrounds. It’s my job to make sure we harness these different viewpoints into one vision and that we all work in concert to achieve it. I also make sure that while we’re delivering on our near-term plans, we’re thinking of ways to stay innovative for the future. In essence, I make sure our amazing team has the direction and support that they need to do their best work.
In what ways has the pharmaceutical industry changed over the past few years in relation to the adaptation of technology?
There has been a shift in the way pharma uses technology to drive more innovation. We aren’t just seeing pharma adopt new tech, but also the sector is using it to drive innovation at a faster and larger scale. For example, artificial intelligence and machine learning are being used in research and clinical trials to help analyze data and predict patient outcomes. Technology is also being used to deliver better, more personalized and more transparent patient experiences. More efficient patient information-gathering leads to more streamlined delivery of prescriptions and better communication methods from pharma companies and pharmacists to encourage adherence from their patients.
So much of the medical industry is seen as private, especially when it comes to costs. How do you ensure that you are able to be transparent and gain customers’ trust?
This is a great question and is one of the reasons why GoodRx exists. Prescription prices are notoriously opaque. A medication could cost you $500 at one pharmacy but $50 at a pharmacy across the street. GoodRx was founded to help tackle this issue and bring access, affordability and transparency to the industry. We do this by putting thousands of prices and discounts in the hands of consumers and giving them power to choose the price and location that works best for them. Our goal is to build trust by being on the side of the consumer. But we know it’s important that we’re also a trusted brand for the whole ecosystem. When millions of consumers and hundreds of thousands of health care providers trust GoodRx every day to help them navigate the opacity of the prescription drug ecosystem, we pave the way for retailers and manufacturers to access those trusted relationships through GoodRx.
What is next for GoodRx?
We’re continuing to build out our offering to deliver even more value to our millions of users and other healthcare stakeholders. If you look at GoodRx as little as two years ago, our business focused on the prescription discount space and providing consumers with the best prices, access and transparency. While this is still a large and growing part of our business, there are so many other avenues for providing value that we’re excited to explore. Part of that involves finding new ways to work with other health care players like pharma manufacturers, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and health care providers. Creating value-add solutions for these stakeholders enables us to drive even greater value for our consumers.
