When a physician prescribes a medication, most patients don’t think about the cost—until the prescription is filled. Not only can the high cost of some medications cause sticker shock, it can prompt some patients to question whether they can even afford the medication. Rx Savings Solutions’ remedy to rising drug costs is to bring transparency to drug pricing by working with employers and health plans to identify, and proactively communicate to patients, opportunities to save on prescription drugs.

The company’s approach to lowering the cost of prescriptions is not going unnoticed by venture capitalists. The Overland Park, Kansas-based company recently secured $18.4 million in new funding that it will use to expand its sales force, increase marketing and add new functionality to its software. The company has raised more than $22 million since its founding in 2012.

One enhancement on tap for 2018 is to help employers and health plans lower the cost of expensive specialty medications, Michael Rea, founder and CEO of RX Savings Solutions says. Other enhancements in the pipeline include an adherence app that helps patients remembering to take medication on time and understanding the directions for taking it. The company also plans to quadruple its sales force, which sells directly to employers and health plans with at least 5,000 employees or members, Rea says. Clients include The State of Kansas Employee Health Benefits Plan, Quest Diagnostics, Petco and Kansas City Blue Cross Blue Shield.

RX Savings Solutions lowers consumer prescription costs by integrating an employer’s or health plan’s prescription benefit to its software platform and continuously monitoring patient prescription claims. All claims are analyzed to identify alternative medications and where those medications can be purchased at a lower cost. Savings opportunities are sent to patients via text or email.

“The reality of prescriptions is that they are a predictable, repeated transaction, so each time a prescription is refilled, we have an opportunity to find savings and push notifications out to the patient,” says Rea. “It may take multiple messages to get patients to engage, but each message is an opportunity to get them to think differently about their prescriptions and empower them to take action.”

On average, RX Savings Solutions can lower business and health plans prescription drug costs by $5 to $6 per employee or member, per month, Rea says. For a business with 5,000 employees all taking prescription drugs, lowering prescription drugs costs by $5 for each employee would save them $300,000 a year, for example. “The amount of the savings incurred is tied to the number of employees or members in a plan,” Rea says.

Rx Savings Solutions expects to reach 2 million members during the first quarter of 2018, up from 1.2 million from the same period in 2017.

As part of its ongoing plan to roll out new features, RX Savings recently began testing a button that patients can tap on its mobile app or click on its website when they want to switch to a lower cost, but therapeutically equivalent medication. “We take care of contacting the patient’s doctor about the switch to make it easier for the patient to navigate the system,” says Rea. “Ours is a bottom-up approach to using technology to interface with the patient and drive efficiency.”