“Making Patients Healthier”

For Martty Martinez-Fraticelli, President at PharmPix to be a successful entrepreneur requires more than a single or a set of rules but a personality trait, and this is grit. “It is tempting to give up after the first 10 or 20 negative experiences or rejections. We decided to keep pecking until getting the first big yes. Of course, along the way you must be attentive to your mistakes and keep learning and modifying,” he explains. “Being in constant learning mode is what will take us to great heights. As a great business leader once said, ‘Leaders must double their capacities every three years’.”

"PharmPix was born to address two big pain points, firstly poor innovation due to legacy systems across the industry, and secondly, plan sponsors not having control of their pharmacy benefits."

PharmPix was born to address two big pain points, firstly poor innovation due to legacy systems across the industry, and secondly, plan sponsors not having control of their pharmacy benefits. “You should not process a pharmacy claim just for paying purposes. You must take in consideration who are you processing the claim for. For us, patients’ health is paramount,” says Martty. “Thus, it is embedded in our pharmacy claims processing engine. Savings follow when patients are healthier.” PharmPix also believes that plan sponsors must have the control over their pharmacy benefits, and it must address their members’ needs.

The biggest challenge Martty and his team faces today is to demonstrate that innovation does not only originate from Silicon Valley, but also comes from confronting big challenges and working hard to overcome them. How does PharmPix overcome the challenge is by making heavy investments on marketing. “When selling a service as oppose to a product, marketing is even more important to make your service tangible. Besides, marketing must show a glimpse of the technology without showing too much for competitive reasons,” says Martty. “Our innovation has been geared by creating multiple business models. We also offer demonstrations of our capabilities and then, invite prospects to give us an opportunity for a small pilot with our technology. When clients realize the superiority of our technology, then, it is time to get incremental volumes until getting their total BoB.”

PharmPix offers innovative services for health plans and insurers, medium to large employers and union groups, private and government health programs, including Medicaid and Medicare. They have studied the pain points of all segments of their industry and create solutions for all of them, keeping in mind that the key to a successful innovation is to create new business models. PharmPix ensures being super flexible, supporting any number of arrangements with the clients: from traditional third-party full pharmacy benefit management (PBM) service contracts to applications licensing agreements. As per Martty, besides technology, human resources are key. “A high performing team is utterly necessary to support our different arrangements. With this in mind we hire the best people, train them, discern similar from different tasks between multiple type of arrangements, to create policies and procedures that simplify and sync the operations.”

In an instance, PBMs had historically available a handful of legacy technology to process their pharmacy claims. These legacy systems are a one size fits all capabilities offering very limited control to the PBMs. With PharmPix’s technology clients acquired control of their businesses. “One example, Client A started four years ago with us in a type of arrangement where PPx did everything for them. After the first year, they took over all benefit configurations, retail network, member call center and clinical services,” says Martty. For the days to come, PharmPix is aggressively working to become the biggest independent pharmacy claims processor in the market. At the same time, they are looking closely to all stakeholders involved in the patients’ journey to get healthier. “This is helping us producing or acquiring innovations, centered on reducing the pain of the patients to become healthier and being able to measure outcomes that demonstrate it,” adds Martty. IE