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Thursday, 21 May 2026 |
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| As health tech gets more competitive, a strategy companies use to stand out is providing their products for free. They’re betting this will help build up a large and loyal base of users who will be willing to pay later once they grow accustomed to it. It’s a classic
playbook used by companies such as OpenEvidence and OpenAI (and many, many companies across tech before them). |
| The big question, though, is how to make money while it’s free. Health tech’s newest unicorn, Forus, says it found an answer that will keep it free for healthcare providers to use indefinitely. |
| The New York City-based startup, which raised $160 million last week at a $1 billion valuation, automates the administrative steps to getting a prescription approved and filled. (Forus was formerly known as Tandem.) When doctors use its platform to check their patients’ insurance coverage for different medications, Forus builds a map of which drug a
patient was prescribed, the insurance plan they're on, the pharmacy it routed to and whether coverage was denied or approved. Its system learns from this map to suggest more efficient paths to getting patients’ scripts approved in the future. |
| But as the adage goes, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. Access to that information is also valuable to pharma companies, which need it to understand where their drugs are reaching patients and where coverage is changing — and they’re willing to pay for it. |
| “A lot of the challenge in pharma today is that they have a bunch of different companies selling them different subsets of data, and then they have to work through a combination of consulting firms and guessing to figure out what to do with that,” CEO and founder Sahir Jaggi told me. “The way we think of ourselves is that the network can actually help facilitate the right stuff on the ground.” |
| In addition to business intelligence, pharma companies also pay to include their patient support programs on Forus’ platform for doctors to access after they choose a drug. |
| “It’s unsustainable to have so many new things that all cost so much money even if they are reducing some of the administrative costs in the system,” Jaggi said of the many AI tools on the market. |
| - Ngai |
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Worldwide made. Thanks for reading.
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