How UGO Turns Data into Dollars| Partnership Series [Podcast]

Becky:

Hey everyone. Thanks so much for tuning into another one of our partnership series. I'm very happy to have Ajay from UGO Rx with us today. He's going to be sharing some great information about their platform and a lot of really interesting ways that they can help you and your independent pharmacies. So Ajay, thanks so much for joining us today.

Ajay:

Yeah, thank you guys so much for having us be a part.

Becky:

No problems. Hey, so you guys have been a hot topic at RJ Hedges for about a year now. Jenny and Allie were at a conference. They met you. They came back and said, "Becky, you've got to find out more about this company. We need to get some extra information out to our clients." So I'm glad we were able to get our schedules together. But one thing for sure, when you met with Jeff a couple of weeks ago, or a couple of months ago, I should say, he was very excited about the platform and the services that you offered to your users, and he wanted to make sure that we could get this information out to all of our clients. So thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and about how your company came to be? So all of those folks listening to you, whether they're our clients or people who just follow us, get a better sense of what UGO Rx can do for them.

Ajay:

Yeah, no, thank you so much. And again, thank you to Jeff for seeing and giving us the time to see what we're doing. So yeah, my business partner and I, unfortunately he couldn't join me on this today, but we owned an independent pharmacy in Los Angeles for just a little over a decade, and a lot of everything that we built in this platform really just came from our experience as owners. And not to say just experience, but the things we kind of went through and the things we felt we needed and couldn't find as independent owners during a time of struggle. Obviously when things are good, everything's good. And as an owner you are making money and you're not paying attention to certain aspects of the business that could hurt you down the road. And 2016, 2017 kind of came as a sledgehammer to us when we owned our pharmacy, and we came to realize there were a lot of things that we just weren't doing well.

And what was worse is we didn't really know how to identify those things, and then once we could identify them, what to do about them. And so it was a very daunting in the dark type of feeling of not knowing what to do and not knowing how to correlate any of it into action. So Arsen and I kind of sat back and looked at our business, and to be honest with you, Becky, we were on the verge of shutting it down. We came to that conversation where we looked at each other and said, "Maybe we just hang it up." And my business partner's a brilliant audacious type character, and he called me up super late one night and goes, "Hey, we're not going out this. We're doing something wrong. We can fix this if we just really put our minds to it."

And it was in those exercises of kind of putting our minds to it, which consisted of a ridiculous amount of Excel reports and a lot of, as we call them, like come to Jesus meetings with ourselves where we're sitting there going, "What are we doing?" we came to realize that other people were probably going through the same thing, and it spiraled this notion of, well, if we're going through it, other people are going through it. And if we're helping ourselves, why can't we help everybody else and leave some sort of an impact on the industry? So that's what kind of kickstarted this whole notion of building this platform, and it kind of spiraled from there. It really is a culmination of all the things that we considered like a personal wishlist as a pharmacy owner that we wish we had. And so that's how UGO came to be.

Becky:

Awesome. So can you give us the three main components of UGO? And what all services can somebody enroll in?

Ajay:

Yeah, absolutely. So when we owned our pharmacy, we were pretty heavily weighted on Medicare part D adjudication. And for those of you out there that are doing Medicare part D or I mean honestly adjudicating any prescription at any point, you're probably well accustomed to things like rejections and prior authorizations and underpaid claims, or in the Medicare space, maybe even high patient copays, right? That used to happen to us all the time. If something goes through. But it's like a $200 copay for a Medicare patient, that's not going to fly In those scenarios, we were always met with this dilemma of being asked by the clinic, "Hey, doctor wants to know what's covered." And so that spiraled the first and most important element of UGO, which is we actually went direct to CMS.

And it took us over two and a half years to do this, but we ended up taking the entire Medicare part D formulary and coding that into a search tool so that users, technicians, PICs, owners could now, when they received a rejection or or underpaid claim or over cost copay, could go right into UGO, type in the drug prescribed, the patient's bin group and healthcare plan, and see specifically within seconds what's actually covered on that patient's formulary, so that we could now get out ahead of the issue. And instead of playing back and forth for three to four days with the clinic, we can go to the clinic right up front and say, "Hey, Jane Doe's prescription got PA'ed. Here's some covered alternatives," and streamline everything.

The second main aspect that we wanted to do is now we could... By addressing that, we were able to learn from Medicare, but we also wanted to scratch this itch that all independent owners have, which is, "Hey, is there something out there I don't know about? Is there something I'm not privy to? Am I doing things correctly? Am I doing things poorly? Sometimes we're just looking for confirmation or affirmation of what it is that we are or are not doing. And we felt that there was nothing in the industry that allowed us to unify as an industry under one umbrella, regardless of our PSAO or wholesaler or PMS system. So the second most important aspect of UGO is that we coded it to be crowdsourced. So for our pro users, basically they joined the UGO community, and we can now allow users to learn from each other anonymously by searching an entire dashboard of adjudicated data from all of our UGO users, which is really, really cool because it makes... It lifts the veil off of everything, and everyone's privy to what other labelers are out there.

And it shows frequency of a certain label, which allows you to see if hey, a lot of people are gravitating to a certain brand, maybe it's cheaper, or it allows users to ask important questions outside of just what does something reimbursed? Because pharmacy has become so much bigger than just what does it reimburse? Right? And then, of course, the last and most important element that we built because I'm a data geek was an analytics dashboard. Everything spawned from that ultimately, was my business partner and I spending hours and hours and hours on weekends just pining through Excel reports from our dispense data. And we realized that that was such a cumbersome, such an exhausting task. And of course, look, most pharmacy owners went to school for pharmacy, not for business.

So when you start throwing out a hundred different Excel reports, forget the time aspect of it. It's also like drinking water out of a fire hose. What are you even looking at? And that, I think, sucks, to put it eloquently. It sucks. No one wants to sit there and do that. So our goal is to sit back and go, look, there is no shortage of data analytics tools. In fact, many of these pharmacy management systems are very robust at providing data, but it's about providing what we felt was relevant data, cutting the noise, cutting the fat. I don't want to step into my car and see the dashboard of a 747. That's too much. I just want to see a couple gauges that tell me how to drive, and that's it. And that's really what we felt was lacking. We felt like most programs out there were made by tech companies trying to tell pharmacies what they "needed to do." And these developers had never spent a day behind a bench.

And so with all due respect to them, I don't think they really are in a position to advise on what we kind of need. And so that was really what spawned everything about UGO, is we felt like there was something that needed to be made for the industry by us in the industry.

Becky:

So when somebody goes to implement your dashboard and they become a user, there's some tough conversations that they're going to have to have with staff, patients, practitioners if they're going to be fully immersed in your offerings and take advantage of the data that they are being provided. Can you get into what some of those conversations might look like and how they might be able to leverage the benefits of your platform when talking to patients, practitioners, and staff?

Ajay:

Yeah, absolutely. We kind of privy a lot of things with our users with a joke. It's sort of a joke, but there's always truth in sarcasm. And we always tell them like, "Hey, once you sign up, get ready to get uncomfortable." The most cheesy analogy I can give you is it's like signing up for a gym membership. We all come in with these goals in mind. We have this thing we want to accomplish, whatever that goal is when you sign up for the gym, just to get healthy or whatever it may be. But what we try to do with everybody is we go, "Look, it's that path to achieving that goal is not always just the easiest thing." So we've deliberately split our platform up into two kind of profiles. We've got our UGO basic version and our UGO Pro. So when users come on for UGO basic, what they're getting is the Medicare part D drug research tool.

That's really what they want. And that's fine. We have a lot of users that come on and go, "Hey, listen, we've got things pretty dialed in, but it would be nice to know when we get hit with some of these things." If there's an alternative out there, great. And we work with their technicians on training that one. And then we've got our pro version, which is data analytics and community search. Now, the tough conversations kind of exist on both sides, right? Even with the basic version, in most cases, as cool as the platform is, it's something that technicians need to actually buy into. They need to see it work. And I've come to find from a lot of our users, that tough conversation usually comes down to owners telling their team, "Hey, we got to use this." And so that's something I always try to prep owners for, is that, "Listen, you got to discuss with your staff how this thing works and why you're actually bringing it into the pharmacy, right?"

So yeah, the dashboard didn't look anything like this when we first started. And our technicians, when we rolled it out to them to use, they were met with, of course, a little pushback because it was extra work in a sense of things, right? But when we showed them how much easier and how much it could streamline their entire workflow, just fielding calls from patients that are calling you going, "Hey, where's my medication?" or how much time a technician spends chasing a provider for a PA, and you're basically begging them to do a PA that, in most cases, isn't really favorable for the pharmacy, in a lot of cases when it comes to a profit standpoint or DIR standpoint or anything like that. So what you end up running into is having to have that conversation, and also putting a little system in play to make it work, which we try to help people adopt some sort of an internal system that goes with their workflow.

Now, on the pro side, of course, this is where we start to really get into that situation of analyzing what is good business and bad business. And this is always an interesting aspect, Becky, because the platform will immediately, in most cases, bring some things to light to owners. As owners, you kind of get accustomed to this aspect of let's just sweep it under the rug and hopefully find something else that pays better, and I don't have to think about it or address it. It's almost this kind of passive nature that we've come to adopt that's kind of silently drowning us. And so owners have to kind of look at things and go, okay, you may run into a situation where you have a provider that sends you a lot of their patients. Now, this used to happen at our pharmacy. But when I really broke down the numbers and did the analytics on that provider, not only was I spending $30,000 a month to stock the medications that that provider would prescribe, but we were losing money on almost all those patients.

So I started to look at it and go, wow, although it looks good on paper that we're filling in this high RX count and we've got lives under management and so on and so forth, I'm actually spending 30 grand to lose two grand. This is craziness. And God forbid you have an audit, your losses are magnified for any random reason. We all know PBMs kind of operate to the beat of their own drum, but so those are really interesting components to highlight. Or moreover, a lot of times what we see with our users is, I hate to say this, but sadly enough users get enamored, or I should say kind of blindly roped into their rebate agreements with their wholesalers, and they very quickly... One of the first things we teach on UGO is this tool we call manager NDCs. My business partner is brilliant at training with people and really takes the time to look into aspects of their pharmacy as though it was his own.

And he's really, really good at highlighting what we like to refer to as quick wins, because whenever somebody comes onto the platform, we're big believers that you need to see it work. This isn't one of those things where, hey, hang on, do it for a couple months, and let's kind of hope and pray. No, the platform's going to highlight some aspects to you, and an uncomfortable conversation you may have to have might be with your wholesaler, or it might be with your PSAO, or it might be with yourself to ask yourself whether, hey, I know I've ran it this way for a very long time, but because it worked before doesn't mean it works now. And am I willing to make that shift of really changing up the whole business element of things for the greater good and improvement of the pharmacy? And that was conversations that my business partner and I, we had with ourselves in 2018.

It was, wow, we've been doing things a certain way for the last eight years, but that doesn't make them right anymore. And we continue on that path, we're going on a path to bankruptcy. This is craziness. We kind of had to almost tear it down and rebuild it. And we used UGO as that, a very rough version of UGO at the time, but we used it as our kind of guide. And so everything that we built from a usefulness as a tool was something that we actually used on ourselves on our own pharmacy. And yeah, it even comes down to some patients, right? You look at some medications and patient profiles that you have and you're going, I don't know that I can service this patient anymore. It's really, really costing me. Now, of course, the execution aspect of the information, once you have it, lies in the hands of the user.

We can't force you to get out of your comfort zone, although we can encourage it as much as possible, and you can see the theoretical and actual benefits if you did. It really comes down to the user at that point. That's always the hard part, right? Is you can sign up for the gym, but that doesn't mean 24 hour fitness is going to come wake you up at 6:00 AM and say, "Come on, let me drive you over." That's the hard part. That's really where... We're not going to call you every day and say, "Hey, please, please use the platform," but we are going to offer ourselves in an unlimited fashion to train with users and spend time strategizing with users because we felt like those are the things we wanted when we were an owner.

A lot of times, it's funny, it's not that you need somebody to tell you something basic like, "Hey, just go do more of what pays you well." Yeah, we already know that. Everyone knows that. But a lot of times, it's having a sounding board to just strategize an idea with. And once you find information that's so critical, or you could do something with, being able to speak to somebody and go, "How can I put this into action?" And those are the conversations we love to have. We love to share those things with people. But yeah, getting out of that comfort zone, it doesn't feel good. It certainly doesn't feel good sometimes when you realize you could be doing things better.

Becky:

Great. So I know we talked about the uncomfortable conversations with patients and staff and a little bit about owners. Can you touch a little bit on practitioners? You touched on it for just a moment, you might have to, but can you kind of elaborate on it a little bit more?

Ajay:

Yeah, so I think one of the largest and most important elements of pharmacy that kind of just goes completely untapped right now is the pharmacy's job and role in educating practitioners. I think that that is a very uncomfortable conversation that pharmacists feel to have, right? They don't want to tell a doctor what to do, or it's like this weird dynamic of, I can't tell them. But the crazier thing is what we push with UGO is, look, when you take the analytics and you look at your doctor's framework of their prescribing habits or their payer mix, and then you've got the formulary search to go look at what actually is covered, it's our job to educate practitioners on what's really covered. If we're leaving that to the hands of drug reps, we're really screwed. And that's just not the smart place to be, because as in most cases, the pharmacy will always get the short end of the stick.

We've kind of gotten used to taking the blame for everything already. Whether something goes through, doesn't, copay's high, low, whatever, it's kind of the pharmacy's fault. But from an aspect of educating providers, that is so essential, and yes, albeit uncomfortable. It's a weird conversation to have, to set up a time with a provider and go sit with them and say, Hey, listen, "Here's what you prescribed to your patients that we serviced in the X amount of timeframe, whatever. Here's what you could have done. Just so you know, here's actually covered. Here's how many PAs we got on cyclobenzaprine. You write cyclobenzaprine for everybody, but hey doc, it gets PA, and all your patients are SilverScript. Have you considered [inaudible 00:17:25] or baclofen?" You go in and they actually, believe it or not, and most users are so surprised that they're met with a welcoming appreciation from the providers going, "Wow, you actually saved me and my staff time."

And because you saved them time, you saved them money. And that's something... Time is one of those things those providers are desperate to get, and it really... Although it's uncomfortable at first, it becomes this awesomely essential aspect of building this bond, right? You have the two people in charge of patient care, the provider and the pharmacy, and we're the two left out of the loop when it comes to drug coverage, and it's craziness. So that's what we wanted to bridge and go look instead of top down, we could go bottom up here because the pharmacy is the one that knows essentially what medications a patient's on. We're in the best position to advise a practitioner about what's best suited for a patient's wellbeing in a sense and patient care. And then of course, look, you run into circumstances where you realize a practitioner is just drowning you, and that their claims are just no good. We had this one practitioner years back who... I know they mean well. He thought he was helping us out by sending us five to 10 prescriptions of his patients a day.

And he was a very prominent pain clinic and he would send us DUEXIS all the time. And for those of you that are familiar with DUEXIS, it's a ridiculously big ticket item. It always requires a PA, it underpays, and you lose money including DIR fees. It is an absolute sucky gig all around. And he would send us those all day, and I finally had to meet with him and go, "Look, please stop sending us business. Please. I know you think you're helping us, but you're killing me. So much of my overhead capital, especially my funds being tied up with my wholesaler, are going to fill these prescriptions that I'm losing money on. And although I love to service these people and we love to get this and this out of there, this is a bad move for us. So identifying what we coin as bad business, and then taking action upon that. But you better believe that's a weird conversation to have, because it's counterintuitive, right?

You want as many prescriptions as you can do, and you never want to tell somebody this notion. But believe me, providers are surprisingly, again, very receptive to understanding. Because look, we both fight the same fight. Providers are up against PBMs when it comes to their billing, or I should say insurance companies more or less, and we're up against the PBMs and we're all kind of fighting that fight of getting shortchanged. And so they get it, but it is a very essential conversation to have, educating them, as well as sometimes just cutting out the bad business. Yeah.

Becky:

Great. Thanks for sharing that. And you started to talk a little bit about a case study, and that was actually my next bullet point, was to see if you could share with us some of the case studies that you've had, the successes that you have seen from UGO users already who have taken your advice, taken your platform, taking the coaching and the education that you've been providing and putting it into practice. So can you share some of those with us today?

Ajay:

Yeah, absolutely. So we've got some people that... Literally, it's one of those things where you can go as basic with its application as you want or as deep as you want. I'll give you an example of both, right? So we have some user's in its most basic form. One of our users using our manager NDC tool did something so simple where they just logged into manage my NDCs. We've got this little calculator that we programmed into it to help people negotiate on pricing with their wholesalers. He typed in a percentage, hit the export button, and literally he forwarded to McKesson. And the joke, he called me and he goes, "Hey, you wouldn't believe it. I exported my top 100 dispensed NDCs with this requested price. I forwarded it over to them. And hey, don't get me wrong on about 70% of them, they told me no go, but on 30% of them, they dropped the price down to my request."

I was like, "No way." He goes, "It took me five minutes." So something that basic was so cool to see that he actually. It was a funny way. He is like, "I just exported it and emailed it, and kind of threw a hail Mary, see what happens." But you'd be surprised. When you come from a standpoint of having that education behind you of what you're actually looking for, the wholesalers react differently. And so that was a very simple use, and that actually became something that we teach on our very first training with all of our users, is look, you control what you can control, right? Things out of your control, out of your control. But if you can work with your wholesalers on pricing, that was massive. And we've seen every subsequent user thereafter from his kind of idea of doing that, use that same trick, and it works. It's awesome.

Becky:

Oh, great.

Ajay:

So that was a really, really cool kind of example. And then we've had one of our clients, for example, where she spends... And I get asked this all the time. Somebody will ask me, "How much time does a typical active UGO user spend?" It's kind of like asking somebody, "How much time do you spend at the gym if you go?" We can safely say, from looking at backend analytics, that a really active user is probably somebody that spends an hour a week. However, they cut it up. Some people do 15 minute increments, some people will do a straight hour on a Saturday, whatever it is that they do. But one of our users who's been super active, she's very good at executing as well. She was able to, in the course of 60 days, make some pretty important changes, and she increased her profit per prescription by four bucks.

That's pretty massive to do on the overall scale. To increase your profit per RX by $4 was huge, and it was really, really cool to see. And she's just one example of people that will look into it and exercise a few options to find gains, right? We've also got some people that in their most simplistic form, use UGO to manage refills. It's something that we all think is automated and it's taken care of, but we had one of our users take a look at a previous month's adjudicated data. And because UGO allows you to customize your own data to look at it in any kind of form and facet you wish to hone in on, this user chose to focus on the topical medications that they dispense, oddly enough, because you had a good point. Topical medications are typically patients use them like toothpaste, right?

They don't really follow the instructions. And so you might reach out to a patient on the time of their refills due and be met with an answer of like, "Hey, I still have some, I don't need it." Or in the same token, you may speak to a patient who ran out a week early, or whatever it may be. Long story short, which you end up getting is an imbalance or a jumble of refill intervals. And this user was able to highlight that some of the key items that they had dispensed actually did not end up getting refilled. Because although they were reached out to on their 30 day interval, the patient already had some, but then that patient was never recontacted, it never got settled in, and so it just flat out got missed. And that user was... In their circumstance, I think they literally picked up I think like $1,800 and missed refills in a day, which was crazy, but it was super cool to see.

So yeah, we've got these people that have totally revamped their entire marketing strategy, dare I say, even identity of their pharmacy based on once they look at their data analytics. Like I said, you come to this kind of stark realization that what may have worked all these years is just no longer prudent for you, and you've got to make a shift. And in being able to highlight the areas that do work, pharmacies are able to pivot now, and they're able to pivot from an educated standpoint because we have something like the community search, where if you take a look at where a high concentration of your business comes from, you can take that, go into the community and go, I wonder what other people are doing for that same concentration. Is this something I should employ? Is this kind of a pivot I should make? Kind of circling back to the uncomfortableness of things. It's a weird feeling sometimes when you realize that you've got to make a shift.

But in example of those few clients that I just mentioned, they executed on that. So that's at the heart of everything, is if you're willing to execute, even in its most simplistic form, by controlling what you can control, you're going to see benefits and results from this. But the commitment aspect of it is in the hands of the user. You've got to be willing to want to better your business, but the tool aspect of providing everything you could possibly do is really there. And it's there because we did it on our own pharmacy. This was kind of a building the plane as we were flying it type of thing.

Becky:

Thank you so much for sharing those. And I just realized that I had a double bullet point. It's almost the same thing because my next bullet point, or what are some of the standout success stories of people really taking the tools that you're giving them and running with them? So I know what your thoughts are if you want to address that one, and I can rephrase it in a way so it doesn't sound so conversational like this. Or do you think that's very similar to what we just did with the case study question?

Ajay:

Well, I can point out anomalies-

Becky:

Okay.

Ajay:

... that will standout, oddly kind of interesting. So from a standout scenario, we actually had one of our users realize that all of their good business, let's call it, was really coming down to about three providers. And what this individual chose to do, which she's kind of a rockstar for having the guts and the moxie to do this, she literally tore her pharmacy down to its guts. She let go of half her staff, she brought it all back down. She had very uncomfortable conversations with then when she transferred probably, I don't know, 60% of her patient base to Walgreens, it was just like, no, I'm just going to tell everybody I'm so sorry because I'm going out of business. This is either going to go this way or this way. And she pivoted her entire marketing of her pharmacy to focus on kind of three major ailment treatments, which was this local OBG, she had a gastro. And then I think the other one, gosh, I want to say I think it was a dermatologist in her locale. And that was it.

And she realized that actually reducing her overhead, her headache and her RX count focusing on less business that was more profitable, she picked up more time and more end of the month net profit, and she was happy as a clam. And that was really, really cool to see. That, to me, is an extreme case of that stood out. I was like, wow, you actually took this and went DEFCON3 on this thing. Okay, that's pretty cool. But again, I commend her because she came into it going, "I know I'm doing this wrong and I know there's a better way to do this. And that's just it. I'm not going to lose my life savings."

I remember her words to me. "I came out, I've sunk my life into this thing, and I'm not just going to go down this way." And I thought that was super commendable. It was really, really cool. And then of course, we've got another one of our people down here in actually California. This individual was very, very proactive on their cost cutting, very proactive, to the point where they realized what they were doing was just not a good long-term bet. They took the extreme measures of [inaudible 00:28:39]. I know he... What my understanding was he even went so far as to fill out like a HELOC on his house, switched his PSAO around because he knew that they were going to freeze his capital due to the DIR fees and all this hoo-ha. They went the extreme step of resetting up the entire business because he came to the fact that if he continued this way with the way the numbers were looking, and then analytics, it was basically just sinking.

And he turned around his ability to acquire medications. He was no longer under the PSA's kind of guillotine of you either buy from us or no bueno, and he took that and basically maximized his cash outlay on what he could acquire and really, really improved his profit for Rx. But it was a path. It was a journey. I think it took him almost close to a year of doing that. And he kept in close contact with Arsen and I, letting us know along the way of all the steps he was going through. And it was a nightmare. It wasn't fun. Again, I kind of note these as standout success stories because that's really diving into the far, far deep end of the pool and going, "I'm going to really change this thing up." But he tells us till today that it was the truth, as he kind of says. He saw in the analytics, the numbers don't lie. It was the truth in the analytics that really led him to make that decision, and that it probably saved his kind of financial future going forward.

So those were really cool circumstances to see. It's always fun for us to see people take it and just run on their own path with it, because the tool is meant to be a power drill. Can you do a lot of these things by hand? Sure, you could buy a screwdriver and try to build a house, but it's going to take a long time. So that's really what it's meant to do.

Becky:

Great. And I love that there's different levels that people can get involved in. So whatever their time commitment is, whatever their interest is, they just want to make sure, like you mentioned earlier, am I doing it the right way? Is this validation that I'm on the right path? Is there a little bit of room for improvement? Where would it be? And then there's the drastic side of, I have to make a huge change right now to change my ROA, to change my projection, to change my ability to really control my own destiny. And I love some of those case studies that you were able to share with. And definitely the moxie that one person in particular had, that's very courageous to try. But I feel like a lot of these pharmacy owners, they are so aware and so in tune and they want something, they need to physically grab onto something, and this tool is going to be that resource that they can use as much or as little as they want to be able to show them full transparency what they haven't been able to see before.

Also, to part the fog and say, okay, this is way too much information here. I need to hone in just on this specific area. And how's it going to improve? But I love this information and how much it can benefit so many of our clients and the other independent pharmacy owners that are out there. So thank you very, very much for sharing all that great information.

Ajay:

Thank you.

Becky:

But now the most important part, in my opinion. I'm a fond believer of seeing is believing.

Ajay:

Sure.

Becky:

So if you would, could you take us through a demo of the platform, so we can actually see things in action and you can explain to us a little bit about what UGO Rx can do for some of our people live?

Ajay:

Absolutely. Let me know if you can see that.

Becky:

I can.

Ajay:

Okay, cool. So yeah, welcome. This is our UGO homepage. So we try to keep things as kind of cookie cut basic as possible. We start off with our UGO search bar, where here, users can type in a keyword just like you do on Google and the name of a drug and search the community to see what people are doing. Our claim to fame and most kind of important element is the Medicare part D. And I want to start off by showing you all a quick example of how this works. So I am going to just pick on a Medicare plan that most people do a lot. Let's go with SilverScript Choice Caremark. It's kind of rx CVSD is the group number. People see it all the time. So let's take for example... I'm going to use that cyclobenzaprine example. It happens a lot, where somebody gets a prescription that comes in, you adjudicate it, it gets a PA, kind of a basic drug.

And in terms of cyclobenzaprine, it's pain related, so you want to try to practice patient care as much as you can and get something out to that patient. So instead of taking that rejection and just going back and forth, hot potato with the clinic, users can now just come over here to UGO, they can go to where it says drug and say, "Hey, I got a prescription for cyclobenzaprine." They can pick the strength prescribed. Now, if you've got the patient's insurance card, you could type in the BIN, the group, the PCN. If you're using a platform like Pioneer or Liberty or something like that, they actually will even tell you the healthcare plan ID and the eligibility check, which is super cool because it makes it even faster. But let's say you've got that patient's healthcare card. You don't even need to type in their bin group. At the bottom of the insurance card, it says the healthcare plan. It'll say like SilverScript. You could start to type in silver, and boom, there you go. SilverScript comes up.

The moment you hit search, you see that Cyclobenzaprine is on formulary, but this little red arrow shows you that, hey, that's got a PA. And yeah, you knew that, you got the pa, but what you didn't know was this little green tab right here. You click it for alternatives. And now in a couple seconds, the platform spits out for you, correlated to the same drug class, every central muscle relaxant available on that formulary that's covered for the patient. Now what you can do is simply scroll through and look at the ones that don't have a red arrow, or you can even come over here and click the no restriction option to view all your results that are no PA. But what you're looking at now is a whole list of everything covered as an alternative to cyclobenzaprine, so you can now reach out to the provider in moments and let them know what's up.

What the platform also does is it tells you what tier that drug is, and it tells you on average, according to CMS, what that drug should reimburse per unit, which is super cool because our goal was to promote pharmacies to not have to fish and test claim, and we don't want to be off the PBMs here, but we also want to come into this educated to know what our options are that not only work wonderful for the patient, but streamline the operation for the clinic, and we don't go bankrupt in the same time, right? So we can look at something, find a viable option here. Maybe [inaudible 00:34:58], that it's 68 cents a unit. And if we dispense 90 of these like cyclobenzaprine, it could reimburse $60 as opposed to the cyclobenzaprine that's 35 cents a unit that would reimburse $30. So we might just be able to have a win all around if the provider feels that that tizanidine is a great fix, then it's a win-win win. And of course, reimbursement doesn't equate to profit.

That's why we've built in a price check tool where if users find something interesting or an NDC, they can click this price check. And what it does is it pings our system. Our system will do the hard work for you. It will go search an entire myriad of secondary wholesalers, send you an email back saying, "Hey, here's what that NDC is available for on the open wholesale market." And the reason we did that was we wanted to keep wholesalers honest. We want people to come in, and even if it's your primary to go in and go, look, how much can I get this for?

I know I can get it for this amount of price from somewhere else. Can we match it or can we get close to it or whatever it may be. So that's kind of how the function of the Medicare part D search works. And when you're talking about technicians and PICs, this is really, really cool because these are things that they're looking for. So yeah, you could do this for anything, by the way, we had a circumstance situation where my own mom had gotten prescribed Dexilant, for example, because she was experiencing some acid reflux early on, and she's a Medicare patient. And when she went to go get it filled, days went by, she called the pharmacy and they're like, "Yeah, we tried to process it and had a $200 copay, so we reached out to your doctor and we just haven't heard back. It's kind of a common situation that happens that providers never get back.

This saga went on for three and a half weeks where my mom went untreated waiting for some sort of an option. With UGO, that could have been solved in two seconds. The user could have come over and said, "Hey, dexlansoprazole was prescribed," healthcare plan ID. I'm looking at her insurance card. It's HO543-51-000. So this healthcare plan ID is at the bottom of every insurance card. And as you see, it pulled up her specific plan. So when I do this and hit search, I see that Dexilant excellence on there, but it's a tier four, and that's why her copay was high. But if I come over to alternatives, it opens up an alternative tab. I can come here to sort order, and I can just flip this by tier. And now all of a sudden, I see all of her tier one and tier two options.

So now as a pharmacy, I can go back to the provider and say, "Doc, omeprazole is covered, pantoprazole is covered, Nexium is covered. What are some good options for this patient? And we can make a more conclusive, better setup that, again, works for the pharmacy and works for the patient. So that's example with the Medicare Part D search. Okay? Now the second aspect of the platform that I touched upon with you guys is the community search where we're learning from Medicare, but now we also want to learn from each other. So that's this thing right here. When you come in here and you search the community, what you get now is a very similar kind of customizable dashboard to what you would see on your analytics tab, but it allows you to create custom dashboards of community adjudicated data. Plus, you see the drugs people are using. You get to see what NDCs people are using, what they're reimbursing, the frequency. It's a really cool kind of lift the veil off situation.

So you can come over here and you can search community data by insurances, bin group combos. You can even search them by prescriber types, which is super cool if you're formulating a marketing plan. So I'll show you really a kind of interesting use case. Let's say you're out here in California and you're in a highly densely area with Medicaid, for example. You could come over to the dashboard, and you could type in the bin number for Medicaid like 022659, and you could select it. And then I could come to prescriber type and I could type in something like gastro, and I can choose to say, "Show me a dashboard of what all the gastros that are prescribing within UGO, what drugs do they send? Which ones are those? Can I see by frequency?" I can come over here and change it to see what medications are being prescribed by these gastros.

And so it allows me to... Now when I walk in and if I choose to market to a prescriber, I can come in educated. And I can say, listen, we keep these drugs on our shelves, send your patients to us, or whatever it is it might be, whatever your strategy may be, but allows you to obviously see which ones are more effective from a usage case, from a profitability standpoint, all of these things. Again, it allows us to see very quickly what may or may not work. And we can do that with any kind of aspect of the platform we want. We can even search community data by drug usage, which is super cool. So you can learn what's being used for whatever, pain. And I can create a dashboard. I can scroll down and I can see a list of all the different drugs being used for pain. And of course, if I click a dropdown arrow, what's really cool here is I get to see all the different NDC labelers that the community's using, which this is something we wanted to push to get people to shop around.

We want people to see that, hey, if there's another labeler out there... We've got most people using Ascend, but a lot of people using Northstar. Well, which one can you acquire for a better price? What works better for the pharmacy? Because if you're doing a lot of these prescriptions, even a dollar off can add up quick. So that was one of the things we wanted to make sure people were able to do. So you've got the second element of searching CMS, and then you've got confirming and searching the community, right? You come here to confirm and affirm what you're doing. And then of course, the last really important element is right here, our analytics. Now, I'm going to show you two things on analytics guys. First thing is you see this overall dashboard. This is obviously all demo data, but this would be how you would see a dashboard when you log in. We felt that it was most important to see the four key elements that kind of comprise your business.

What's your new to refill ratio? How's your business trajectory doing? Are you more heavily weighted on refills or news? Can I come over here and create a custom timeframe and see what's up? Where am I making my money? Where am I losing my money? And what does that mean to, from an overall standpoint. We use a lot of baseball analogies when we describe things on the platform, we like to tell everybody that, look, the platform is really set up around keeping the bases loaded. Base heads put you in the hall of fame. And when I look at my average profit rx, that's kind of what we refer to as a base hit, something double that profit, double, triple, triple, so on and so forth. It's always awesome to hit home runs. And we feel that people kind of get enamored by the unicorn Grand Slam once in a while. Not that you won't find those and hit those from time to time, but when you focus the elements of your business on the things you can control and focusing around your kind of baseline, right?

Something like managing your NDCs, this was the little tool I mentioned one of our users came in and said, "Hey, if I can get a 10% reduction on my top 100 NDCs," and you scroll down here to the column that says possible plus minus in profit, and I see that if I was to do that, I could pick up 10,000 bucks, holy crap. Well, maybe I won't be able to get 10% off most, but can I get 10% off of 20 out of 100? I don't know. Let's try. Those are the things that add up super quick. And so yeah, you get access to customize your data in a whole slew of ways.

And what we try to do is just make it easy on the eyes visual and a sense of going, "Look, here's my top dispense meds. Here's my top prescribers." Yeah, we know that, but do we know it from a different element? Like who's my top doctor by rx count, but who's my top doctor by profit per rx? Whoa, that's a totally different prescriber. What does that doctor prescribe me? Okay, cool. I need to look into these things. And can I take that and use it to educate other providers? So there's layers upon layers of things that we could do with the data that we wanted to make sure we kind put in this very simple, yet very robust visual format that users could come in and customize to their heart's content.

Becky:

Awesome. Great. Are there any other areas that we need to look at?

Ajay:

No, I don't want it to be kind of sensory overload, but the last cool thing I would say is our forum. We have kind of our own little private UGO community forum. It's meant to be like a Reddit forum, but not open to any random person that just wants to comment in there. You have to be an UGO user. So it's validated by NPI, so you know that whoever you're talking to in the UGO forum is either a pharmacist themselves or a pharmacy owner. So that's really cool because it allows people to create threads, comment on threads, just anonymously share. And the funny thing is, it's so cool to see how open people immediately become when you're talking behind an avatar name and not your real name. So it's nice, but it's super cool to see people get open with each other and ask the questions. They're really thinking it's really special to see.

Becky:

Awesome. Well, Ajay, thank you very much for showing all this-

Ajay:

Thank you.

Becky:

... great information to us today, and going over how your platform works and the benefits that it has. I think the anomaly section that you went over was probably one of my favorite parts, but I greatly appreciated also your case studies that you shared with us. I think being able to hear what other people are doing and how they're utilizing it is a great stepping stone for people who are thinking, maybe this is something I want to try. So folks, if you're interested in getting more information on how UGO can help your pharmacy, I would definitely recommend clicking the link below here in this blog or in the email if you got an email from us, and going directly over to the website so you can schedule a demo and talk to one of their folks and see how UGO can help you folks in your pharmacy today. So Ajay, thanks again for your time.

Ajay:

Thank you guys.