Much of the time when a new employee joins an employer, they will have the option to opt into the company benefits plan, and a person’s prescription medication coverage is often rolled up into that. Many of these plan benefit providers will be working with a central fill pharmacy to have these drugs provisioned for their plan members, and increasingly it makes cost-saving sense to have that central fill pharmacy located in Canada. Having Rx medications more favorably sourced for these providers is the crux of what is pharmacy benefit management.

It takes much of what would be required of plan administrators and puts it in the hands of an external organization that is much more experienced with matters related to managing the benefits of health plan as it relates to prescription drug coverage, and one of the big advantages we can offer here at Canada Drugs Direct when someone has us a partner pharmacy is that we can allow these plan providers to pass on cost-savings to plan members.  

Which is made possible with our ability to source the drugs differently and dispense them for less. Not everyone who can provide pharmacy benefit management will be able to do that to same extent, and part of the reason we are so keen to promote ourselves as a central fill pharmacy is that we continue to be able to source and dispense medications at the absolute lowest prices, and what a company health care plan provider in the US can gain from that is fairly straightforward for them to understand.  

Taking Advantage 

The way that we can work to make drugs more affordable is similar to how a travel agent does the same thing for travel. It is leveraging what we have and taking advantage of the different pharma business operating environment here in Canada. Pharmacy benefit management experts will use networks and purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices with pharmaceutical manufacturers. Explaining the entirety of how this works would take more than one blog entry but suffice to say there are savings to be had. 

What we can say is that those who want to know more about what is a pharmacy benefit manager and what working with a PBM in pharmacy involves will want to visit the pharmacy partner page for more detailed information about all of the advantages we have for sourcing medication and dispensing it at lower prices for any quantity of it. The way the US dollar is currently strengthening while the Canadian one is going in the opposite direction can mean the advantage of having a pharmacy benefit manager are magnified even more than ever for health care plan providers in the USA.