WeRx Uses the Power of the Crowd to Create Price Competition in Healthcare, Publicly Launches iOS and Web App Today

A couple years ago, Charlotte physicians Ali and Amir Khoshnevis managed a patient with eye complications stemming from a systemic disease. One day, they noticed that his blood pressure had skyrocketed to 200/110, which is abnormally high. This confused the Khoshnevis brothers because they knew the patient had been prescribed medications that were supposed to be keeping his blood pressure at a stable level. Worried about the reading, they asked the patient about what was going on. He told them that he couldn’t afford the medications and had to choose his family over taking the medications on a regular basis. He was outside of the poverty line, which made him ineligible for Medicaid and he was too young for Medicare, so he needed to pay for the medications on his own. The patient rationed the medications – he would only take them when he didn’t feel good or felt like his blood pressure was high. The brothers sat down with him, went through all his medications one-by-one and tried to find a solution. That night, Amir decided to send the patient to the emergency room, because he needed immediate care.

The next day, the patient’s wife called Amir and told him that her husband passed the night before at the hospital from a major stroke. The death left the brothers shaken and changed their lives forever. Ali Khoshnevis tells me the collective ignorance about the price of medications from him, his brother and the patient contributed to the tragedy. He and his brother decided that something had to be done to prevent future tragedies.

It motivated the Khoshnevis brothers to create a solution called WeRx, a crowdsourcing application and price aggregator, which publicly launches its iOS and web application today. WeRx allows individuals to submit and share pricing data for thousands of medications in real-time, allowing for smarter purchasing decisions. Continue Reading →