GoodRx is a leading digital platform for consumer health care. It was founded on the belief that everyone deserves affordable and convenient health care in a country where prescription drug prices are not regulated, and the cost of prescriptions can differ significantly depending on the pharmacy. Plus, in the last 10 years, insurance companies began passing 25-80% more of the cost of drugs onto patients.

Based in Santa Monica, Calif., GoodRx was founded in 2011 to address rising drug costs for consumers. Since then the firm has helped Americans save over $35 billion on prescriptions and is one of the most downloaded medical apps on both Google Play and the Apple App Store. Here’s how it works: GoodRx gathers current drug prices and discount coupons on every prescription. Consumers go to GoodRx and input their prescription name, and GoodRx will return results for every pharmacy in America. Consumers may print out the resulting best price in a coupon or show the coupon via their mobile phone in the GoodRx app when they get to the pharmacy. GoodRx prices generally can impact both insured and uninsured people.

Credit: GoodRx

The service is free to consumers and requires no registration. GoodRx makes money from ads on its website and referral fees it gets when consumers use coupons at the pharmacy. The firm also offers a subscription model, GoodRx Gold. For $9.99 per month this program can offer up to 90% off drugs and access to certain health care services. More recently, the firm added telehealth services, which can be booked same-day, with different costs for members and non-members.

The firm was founded by Doug Hirsch after he went to pick up a prescription and found it was $450 at one pharmacy, $250 at another, and $400 at a third. “I learned two things that day,” he said. “For one, having insurance doesn’t guarantee you affordable care. And secondly, that I could compare prices online for everything but prescriptions. GoodRx was started to solve both problems and to help consumers find treatment they can afford.”

The key to this Knowledge Leader’s innovation strategy its proprietary technology, which aggregates data from a complex web of sources and delivers it via a simple, elegant consumer app.

As of 12/31/22, GoodRx was not held in the Knowledge Leaders Strategy.