The Future Is Now: Nathan Holman of RxBenefits On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up Healthcare
Gaining direct access to actionable pharmacy plan-specific data is the best way for employers to understand their employee populations, predict future spending and healthcare needs, and make better pharmacy benefits decisions to improve the quality and affordability of their benefits plans without sacrificing service experience.
As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs I had the pleasure of interviewing Nathan Holman, Vice President of Information Technology at RxBenefits, the employee benefits industry’s first and only technology-enabled pharmacy benefits optimizer (PBO).
Nathan joined the RxBenefits team in 2017, bringing more than 20 years of operational IT experience. His resume includes 15 years in senior leadership across the healthcare, manufacturing, and financial sectors in rapidly growing, emerging companies and billion-dollar entities. In addition to technology leadership, he also brings vast experience running sales and operations organizations. Nathan is a Cum Laude graduate from Reinhardt University with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration.
Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Growing up my father was an engineer and my older brother was into technology, so as a kid, I was always playing with computers. Fast forward to college, I didn’t think much of my technology skills, I just knew I was really good with computers. I found myself always helping out friends and family members and ultimately found myself in an entry level IT admin job running database updates after class in the evenings. My career grew from there as I was always looking for a better way to do things. It was then that I realized that I had both the technology skills and the passion — and decided to pursue a business degree to round out my capabilities. This is why I am here today — a technologist/engineer with a business degree and background.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
You are never too high up the chain to get down on the floor and work with your team on the IT equipment. Just make sure you’re caffeinated! I learned that when I fell asleep under the floor in a data center while doing some legacy cable removal in the late 1990s. I had just been promoted to management and was onsite with my team after hours removing the old cables under the data center floor. This was an old data center with over 3 feet of clearance between the floor tiles and the concrete subfloor, so it was roomier than usual under the floor tiles. It was about 3 am and the combination of white noise and cool temps from the massive air chillers lulled me to sleep. My team thought I had left for the night, so when I awoke at 7 am and crawled out of the floor I scared the heck out of some network admins who were beginning their day. It’s one story I’ll never forget.
Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you/your company are working on?
Absolutely. Let me start by explaining what RxBenefits does. Prescription drug costs are rising and are of significant concern to employers, who are struggling to reduce their pharmacy benefits costs while continuing to protect the health of their employees. In fact, over 60% of employers say their prescription drug and medical spend is costly and unsustainable. As the benefits industry’s first and only Pharmacy Benefits Optimizer (PBO), our pharmacy experts work on behalf of self-insured employers, independently of their medical carrier or pharmacy benefits manager (PBM), to lower purchasing costs, eliminate wasteful spending, protect employee health and safety, and boost employee satisfaction. Our PBO model utilizes advanced Business Intelligence capabilities and data modeling derived from our proprietary analytics platform, RxAnalyzer, combined with clinical expertise to identify potential risk areas in a company’s claims data and recommends hyper-targeted strategies to address them.
We’re incorporating AI/machine learning and predictive analytics into a new technology platform called ONE.RxB. This platform, along with many other capabilities, will enable us to analyze employer trends, patient demographics, prescription patterns and more, model that data, flag important insights and share recommendations to employers in real time. The pharmacy benefits industry has a strong thirst for not only more robust data but also understanding of that data. Our technology will provide employers with deeper insights and enable them to make more informed decisions tailored to the risks and trends in their specific benefits plan.
How do you think the tech/product will help people/industry at large?
The pharmacy benefits industry is very opaque, and the reality is, most employers are significantly overpaying for pharmacy benefits — on average 14% per year — while receiving suboptimal clinical management and customer service. This is often due to misaligned pharmacy contract terms or a lack of a pharmacy contract altogether. It’s essential for employers to not only have transparent contract terms, but to have full visibility into the performance of their plans in order to improve the health of their employee population at the lowest net cost. Applying data analytics enables employers to evaluate and compare pharmacy benefits options as well as gain insights into their plan’s performance and utilization in order to make better decisions about their benefit plan. Advanced data analytics can uncover any potential financial and clinical risks within the prescription drug plan that would not otherwise be easily identifiable, and which can contribute to wasteful spending. Data and predictive analytics can also be used to analyze the cost and employee impact of any decisions before they’re made.
By using data-driven pharmacy decision making, companies are often able to reduce their pharmacy spend by more than 25% on average the first year, as well as protect themselves against future drivers of increased spend, like the rising cost and utilization of specialty medications. Not only that, but the insights provided can also provide opportunities to introduce clinical strategies that promote medication appropriateness, dose optimization and employee safety and quality of life.
Ultimately, optimizing pharmacy benefits with data analytics drives cost savings for employers and helps improve health outcomes for employees. In a competitive hiring environment like we are currently seeing, constructing a pharmacy benefits program that is attractive to current and future employees, optimizes employee wellbeing and reduces overall prescription drug costs can also help employers attract and retain talent.
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
Gaining direct access to actionable pharmacy plan-specific data is the best way for employers to understand their employee populations, predict future spending and healthcare needs, and make better pharmacy benefits decisions to improve the quality and affordability of their benefits plans without sacrificing service experience. Employers typically work with a benefits broker or consultant to design their benefits plans, so partnering with brokers is key to ensuring effective solutions like data-driven platforms are adopted widely.
RxBenefits partners with a large network of pharmacy benefits consultants who then share our solutions with their self-funded employer clients. One of the ways we work with consultants to share the impact of leveraging data analytics or the PBO model is by analyzing their client’s pharmacy claims data at no cost, and then forecasting the cost-savings and member impact of each pharmacy benefits strategy we recommend. We then share that data with the broker, who is then more empowered to help the employer make the best, data-driven decision about their pharmacy benefits plan for them and their members. Often when employers see how much more visibility, control, cost savings and member benefit they can achieve by leveraging a data-driven approach, they are all for it.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
They can check out my personal LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-holman-5653841/. And, follow RxBenefits at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2873210/.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!
The Future Is Now: Nathan Holman of RxBenefits On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
