An Interview With Jake Frankel
Empathy is one. I talked about it earlier but want to dig deeper. Empathy is our greatest asset to create tools that actually solve consumers’ real problems. So many products and services in the healthcare system are designed without thinking about the emotional barriers to care that consumers face. Whether it’s arriving at the pharmacy only to find that your prescription isn’t covered or is too expensive like what happened to me, or receiving a bill in the mail that you weren’t expecting, or navigating a new diagnosis — people experience a lot of frustration and shame in their healthcare experiences. We can’t just focus on logistical stuff and ignore that, you know?
As a part of our interview series called “5 Things We Must Do To Improve the US Healthcare System”, I had the pleasure to interview Doug Hirsch.
Doug Hirsch is GoodRx’s co-founder and Chief Mission Officer. In addition to founding Daily Strength, a social network focused on health and wellness, Doug was an early employee at Yahoo!, where he conceived and managed the earliest online communities including GeoCities and Yahoo! Groups. He also served as the general manager of Yahoo! Entertainment, before moving on to becoming Vice President of Product at Facebook
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into our interview, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I’ve always been driven by curiosity, impact and a desire for connection. In high school, I first discovered my love of music and became a DJ. Nothing was more fun than getting people up and dancing. During and after college, I worked or interned at music labels, hoping to find the next big breakout artists. Around the same time, the early versions of the Internet — AOL, primitive websites — were coming to life and I was fascinated by this new way to connect and impact people’s lives. One day, I saw a fax (this was before the Internet and email really existed) that said a company called Yahoo! was looking for a “multimedia producer,” so I sent them my resume because it sounded like a great way to bring people together.
Not to date myself, but I was one of the first employees at Yahoo!. I was deep in the weeds developing the earliest online communities — do you remember Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Groups? That was me and my team. Later I got a chance to follow my passions as the General Manager of Yahoo! Entertainment, and years later went to work at Facebook, where I launched the photo-tagging feature — hard to remember a time when we didn’t have photo tagging, right?
Eventually, I founded Daily Strength, which was the leading online community for people with health and life challenges. We built an amazing, highly engaged community of millions of caring people. The company was acquired in 2008.
The theme that ties all of these jobs together is “community.” I wanted to create places where people would build connections in profound and meaningful ways. We were just discovering what the Internet could do so I focused on building ways to bring people together.
One of the things I appreciate most about these roles is how they’ve pushed me to keep up with and meet consumers’ needs, which change all the time. First I did that in the music industry, then in big tech, and today in healthcare.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
The story that led me to co-found GoodRx is personal and frustrating — and one most people can relate to. One day I needed to fill a prescription, so I headed over to my local pharmacy. When I got up to the counter to pay, I had extreme sticker shock. I had insurance but they wanted $450 for what was a pretty common medication. I went to another pharmacy where I was told the same drug was $250. I checked a third pharmacy and it was $400. Each place had a different price and they were all outrageous. I couldn’t believe how much I was expected to pay even with insurance, or that the only way I could find out about and compare prices was physically going to multiple pharmacies. I kept thinking, “This is wild. How can they do that?”
So I did what I’ve always done when I come up against a problem. I tried to solve it. To make a long story short, after digging deeper, I realized that my experience was incredibly common and happening to people every day, in every state. There was just no consistency — or transparency — in prescription pricing.
My frustration drove me to try to better understand our healthcare system. Once I had that understanding it really lit a fire under me to find a solution. That solution was GoodRx. Have we fixed the whole healthcare system? Obviously not. No single company is going to be able to do that. But I am proud of the impact we’ve made and how we’ve cracked the code when it comes to prescription savings. We’ve helped consumers save more than $60 billion on medications, and we’re just getting started.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I mentioned earlier that I had a short stint in the music industry after college — the perfect time in your career to learn what can happen when you think you know more than you do. I worked at Sony Music at the time, and we had an opportunity to sign a new band, and I told my boss we should pass. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, right? Well, it was, because that band was Green Day.
In all seriousness, that mistake taught me an important lesson — don’t be a know-it-all. Ask questions. There are no dumb questions. Really, there are only just dumb assumptions and dumb decisions — and those are usually a result of thinking you know more than you do. It’s been really helpful for me to apply this thinking to healthcare, where honestly, I didn’t know anything going into the industry except that it was full of frustrating problems. Let me squeeze in one more lesson — surround yourself with smart people who know your industry.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” — Abraham Lincoln
Too often, we get caught up in waiting for things to happen, but it’s ultimately up to us to drive meaningful change. As someone who has spent the past decade working to better understand and remove the barriers that prevent people from accessing basic healthcare, I’ve realized the future of our health system depends on the action we take as leaders.
How would you define an “excellent healthcare provider”?
That’s an easy one. An excellent healthcare provider is someone who gets that the system is not patient-friendly and who takes the time to serve as a kind of translator. It’s the doctor who spends an extra five minutes explaining the side effects of a medication and goes through a pro/con list with a patient who’s really overwhelmed and didn’t bring anyone to their appointment. It’s the pharmacist who gets that cost is a big barrier and takes the extra five minutes to show someone their discount options so they don’t do what I did and just walk out of the store without their medicine. It’s about empathy and relating to each other as humans. Navigating healthcare is hard, but acting with empathy is not hard.
What are your favorite books, podcasts, or resources that inspire you to be a better healthcare leader? Can you explain why you like them?
I recently had the pleasure of being one of the first guests on Bloomberg’s Vanguards of Healthcare podcast, which has quickly become one of my new favorites. The podcast features inspiring conversations with leaders who are at the forefront of innovation in the healthcare industry. It’s really exciting to hear all these diverse perspectives on how we attack key issues and move patient-centered care forward.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
I’m really proud of the fact that my team makes products that drive consumer engagement. What does that actually mean? Well, most people don’t sit in the driver’s seat of their own care, not because they’re reckless, but because it’s just so complicated and frustrating. And they don’t have good tools. Bottom line, the system sucks. And every time we can make something suck a little less, it’s pretty exciting.
Let me give you an example. We just launched Medicine Cabinet, which as you might guess from the name, is an offering that helps consumers better track and adhere to their medications — and when I say “adhere” I mean taking meds as prescribed. What’s really cool about Medicine Cabinet is it combines GoodRx’s low prices with prescription information, and pill and refill reminders. We even have rewards baked in, so people are getting positive reinforcement when they follow their doctor’s plans. Honestly, it’s a super unique set of tools that gives our users a better way to manage all of their prescriptions from beginning to end. Early data shows that our GoodRx users who engage with Medicine Cabinet are almost four times as likely to claim prescriptions at the pharmacy than non-registered users, and these users are managing more prescriptions within the app, leading to more than 40% more prescriptions filled. It’s really exciting to see the initial impact.
We also want to reach the most people possible with our solutions. You aren’t that successful in tech unless you’re scalable, right? This year we’ve announced a few different partnerships with pharmacy benefit managers that let us reach a whole new set of consumers with our prescription discounts — and our educational resources.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main focus of our interview. According to this study cited by Newsweek, the US healthcare system is ranked as the worst among high income nations. This seems shocking. Can you share with us 3–5 reasons why you think the US is ranked so poorly?
My LinkedIn tagline is “Affordable healthcare would be awesome.” That’s what we’re trying to make happen with GoodRx, and your question is important because we need to know the source of any problem to solve it. Here are my top three:
- Excessive costs. Our country has some of the highest healthcare spending in the world, driven by our use of disparate systems, the heavy spend on administrative tasks (like filling out redundant paperwork as a result of siloed systems), and the rise of prescription drug prices, among other issues. I’ve been focused on bringing down drug prices specifically — GoodRx has saved consumers $60 million to date.
- Inequitable access. Unfortunately, not all Americans have the same, reliable access to healthcare. From high prices, to lack of health insurance, to physical barriers like living far away from specialists, access to health services and overall quality of care often varies across the country. We have an awesome research team at GoodRx composed of health economists and data analysts who have studied these healthcare deserts — areas of the country that lack access to key healthcare services — extensively.
- Unnecessary complexity. From complicated medical lingo to deeply confusing health insurance options, the American healthcare system is not easy to maneuver. We’ve tried to address that through GoodRx Health, our health education resource that provides actionable health information for consumers in language they can understand. Our experts help readers understand everything from HSAs and copays to conditions like heart disease and diabetes.
As a “healthcare insider”, if you had the power to make a change, can you share 5 changes that need to be made to improve the overall US healthcare system?
Some of the key changes that we need to make are tied to those issues I just talked about — access, cost and complexity. But I want to address two more changes that don’t receive enough emphasis or attention, in my opinion. I’m sure you can tell I’m not short on opinions.
Empathy is one. I talked about it earlier but want to dig deeper. Empathy is our greatest asset to create tools that actually solve consumers’ real problems. So many products and services in the healthcare system are designed without thinking about the emotional barriers to care that consumers face. Whether it’s arriving at the pharmacy only to find that your prescription isn’t covered or is too expensive like what happened to me, or receiving a bill in the mail that you weren’t expecting, or navigating a new diagnosis — people experience a lot of frustration and shame in their healthcare experiences. We can’t just focus on logistical stuff and ignore that, you know?
The other change we need to make is creating more transparency across the system. Too many failed efforts here to count. Like when hospitals were required to share their chargemasters publicly, most of what was posted were indecipherable numbers in clunky spreadsheets. I took one look and had this moment of doubt — I asked myself, “how did we get here and can we ever dig out?” But I know we can — think of what GoodRx has done with prescription pricing as a proof of concept.
What concrete steps would have to be done to actually manifest these changes? What can a) individuals, b) corporations, c) communities and d) leaders do to help?
If we’re going to improve access and affordability, which by the way is no small thing, there must be a combined effort. No single individual, leader or organization can solve these issues on their own. It’s up to health leaders to build impactful relationships and partnerships with each other to drive real change. And then it’s up to their teams and communities to support them.
We’ve really doubled down on all this at GoodRx. We’ve developed relationships with pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), insurers, pharmacies, doctors and other healthcare providers, and pharmaceutical manufacturers — part of what we’re doing with these partnerships is shining a light on the positive work that’s being done to solve some of the industry’s greatest challenges.
On an individual level, I’ve always said that our biggest challenge is awareness — educating consumers so that they know comparison shopping for their medications is even an option. People can’t take advantage of a tool they don’t even know exists.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
As I’ve mentioned, the future of our health system depends on the actions we take as leaders, and there must be a combined effort to improve access and affordability for consumers. I would love to move other leaders in healthcare to work together toward a consumer-centric healthcare system with greater transparency, more equity and lower costs. Today, GoodRx works with all the stakeholders in the system, but that’s not the same as them working with each other. Our work has, however, created a blueprint for collaboration and proven it can work and serve all parties while also benefiting the greater good. I believe it’s possible for us to come together as leaders, as innovators and as patients ourselves to not just fix things within the constraints of the current system but truly reimagine the healthcare ecosystem so it actually serves the people whose lives depend on it.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
- https://www.goodrx.com/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougjoe/
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/goodrx/
- https://twitter.com/GoodRx
Thank you so much for these insights! This was very inspirational and we wish you continued success in your great work.
Doug Hirsch Of GoodRx On 5 Things We Need To Do To Improve The US Healthcare System was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.