Rich Sagall was a practicing family physician in Bangor, Maine, in the late 1990s when he became sensitized to the rising affordabil- ity problems his patients were having paying for their prescription drugs. “To be honest, I didn’t pay too much attention to whether people could afford the meds I was prescribing, and I think that was typical of most physicians.”
Sagall was alerted by a colleague to the growing number of patient assistance drug programs. The idea of gathering this information and making it available to patients occurred to him at the same time as he was teaching himself HTML, or hypertext markup language, the first set of tools that early Internet enthusiasts used to build websites.
Sagall and the colleague began building NeedyMeds. Its original focus was providing lower-income patients access to the patient as- sistance programs offered by pharmaceutical companies. After build- ing the site on evenings and weekends, Sagall got some development funding, set up NeedyMeds as a nonprofit, and began spending more and more time on what was no longer a hobby. He said goodbye to his partner—a medical social worker who had decided to move on to other activities—and later stopped practicing medicine to devote all of his time to the venture.
“I feel that with NeedyMeds I’m impacting thousands more peo- ple than I ever could in private medicine,” said Sagall, who later moved to Philadelphia and then Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he still lives.
. . .
Over the years, Rich Sagall has stuck to his original motivations. NeedyMeds has expanded and now provides consumer assistance programs that include:
• Pharmaceutical patient assistance programs, including online application forms (more than 340).
• Manufacturer coupons offering rebates, discounts or even free trials (more than 1,700 drugs).
• A national directory of $4 discount programs searchable by state, drug, and store.
• Drug formulation and dosage listings (more than 4,000).
• Diagnosis-specific assistance programs (more than 1,300).
• Free or low-cost clinics that charge on a sliding scale depending on patient incomes (more than 13,000).
• Organizations that help patients with application paperwork, either for free or a small fee (more than 800).
• Programs that bundle all available support and education programs for specific diseases (more than 50).
• Low-income government assistance programs at the state, county, and local levels (more than 700).
Get What’s Yours for Health Care
How to Get the Best Care at the Right Price
© Philip Moeller
(Simon & Schuster, 2021)
Excerpted with permission of the author.
Rich Sagall was a practicing family physician in Bangor, Maine, in the late 1990s when he became sensitized to the rising affordabil- ity problems his patients were having paying for their prescription drugs. “To be honest, I didn’t pay too much attention to whether people could afford the meds I was prescribing, and I think that was typical of most physicians.”
Sagall was alerted by a colleague to the growing number of patient assistance drug programs. The idea of gathering this information and making it available to patients occurred to him at the same time as he was teaching himself HTML, or hypertext markup language, the first set of tools that early Internet enthusiasts used to build websites.
Sagall and the colleague began building NeedyMeds. Its original focus was providing lower-income patients access to the patient as- sistance programs offered by pharmaceutical companies. After build- ing the site on evenings and weekends, Sagall got some development funding, set up NeedyMeds as a nonprofit, and began spending more and more time on what was no longer a hobby. He said goodbye to his partner—a medical social worker who had decided to move on to other activities—and later stopped practicing medicine to devote all of his time to the venture.
“I feel that with NeedyMeds I’m impacting thousands more peo- ple than I ever could in private medicine,” said Sagall, who later moved to Philadelphia and then Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he still lives.
. . .
Over the years, Rich Sagall has stuck to his original motivations. NeedyMeds has expanded and now provides consumer assistance programs that include:
• Pharmaceutical patient assistance programs, including online application forms (more than 340).
• Manufacturer coupons offering rebates, discounts or even free trials (more than 1,700 drugs).
• A national directory of $4 discount programs searchable by state, drug, and store.
• Drug formulation and dosage listings (more than 4,000).
• Diagnosis-specific assistance programs (more than 1,300).
• Free or low-cost clinics that charge on a sliding scale depending on patient incomes (more than 13,000).
• Organizations that help patients with application paperwork, either for free or a small fee (more than 800).
• Programs that bundle all available support and education programs for specific diseases (more than 50).
• Low-income government assistance programs at the state, county, and local levels (more than 700).