• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, October 17, 2024

Leave it to a teen to come up with a solution for Medicare enrollment headaches.

Four years ago, when Augustus Holm was just 14, he began to help his grandmother compare what prices different Medicare plans would pay for medical prescriptions.

Grandma wasn’t just another senior coping with this painstaking process, however, but one of America’s 921,000 Medicare agents, licensed to help individuals enroll in plans.

“She had a giant binder around 500 pages thick, filled with formularies [a list of drugs] and prices,” Holm recalled to Pharma & Health Insider.

“She would tell me, ‘It’s relatively straightforward, but extremely tedious. I’m going to tell you a prescription name and a plan name. Tell me the associated tier [to get the cost).’ And it would take me around 30 minutes to an hour to help her with one person, because there were a lot of manual comparisons. I wanted to find a faster way to do it.”

The result is CheckRX, an app in which users input drug names and doses -- or just scan medicine labels -- and get back the different costs from Medicare plans in their locale.

That locale so far is mainly the San Diego region, a result of Holm being from that area’s Chula Vista and using a grassroots marketing approach, if you can even call it that.

With SBHIS, a local field marketing organization  that works with insurance agents in the region helping to generate contacts, CheckRX’s staff has been using cold emails and phone calls, along with personal visits, to generate business.

The early results have been impressive.

Speaking with Holm on Monday, exactly a week after CheckRX launched and a day before the start of Medicare’s nearly eight-week-long open enrollment period, we learned that over 500 Medicare agents, and a few doctors, had already become paying subscribers. The app costs $4.99 a month, or $4.17 a month for an annual subscription, both with a 14-day free trial.

There’s also a free version, which allows price comparisons for up to three drugs.

Holm said he expects CheckRX to sign up 4,000 paid users this enrollment season, and for some 8,000 to 10,000 people to use the free “one-off” service.

The proportion of individual paid subscribers -- or seniors themselves -- could eventually grow as Holm hopes to add such additional services as plan enrollments and prescription fulfillment through pharmacies.

“We don’t want to eat up a lot of our budget in marketing costs. We want to focus on being able to build our new features,” Holm explained. “It’s kind of the reversal of a normal startup. We’re not prioritizing extreme growth, we’re prioritizing user experience.”

Gaining consumer users would change the app’s current model that’s based on agents and doctors as subscribers because “they’re the people that would need to use it multiple times.”

Holm also plans for CheckRX to go national.

“As long as we’re able to build our user base here in San Diego and create people who absolutely adore the app and consider it a necessity, not just something that’s kind of useful, our expanding nationally becomes a lot easier,” Holm said, “because now we’re able to contact health plans, doctors’ offices, hospitals and senior homes with a more B2B approach -- instead of trying to reach each individual consumer.”

A big factor in getting those new customers, Holm added, will be CheckRx saying, “We already are saving all these agents this much time.”

Which brings us back to Holm’s grandmother, who’s been using a version of the app for the past year. “She used to handwrite all her clients’ prescriptions,” he said. “Now she gets a photo and uploads it. It saves her on average 10 to 15 hours a week.”