How Found scaled access to personalized weight loss treatment with Photon

“Photon affords us the ability to create a truly personalized experience for our members, whether that’s unlocking Found’s ability to prescribe different medications or empowering members to select a pharmacy that works best for them.” - Luca Ranaldi, CEO of Found.

Found Health, a pioneering evidence-based weight care platform, offers personalized, medication-assisted weight loss designed by the industry's leading obesity specialists. As one of the nation’s largest telehealth weight loss clinics, Found has provided life-changing, clinically-led care to more than 250,000 members. Now, over 100 million Americans may be covered for care with Found through their insurance.

Photon shares Found’s commitment to empathetic patient experiences and partnered with their team to remove barriers to scale. With Photon, Found:

• Offered seamless retail pharmacy pick-up to patients, helping them better navigate out-of-stock issues at local pharmacies for medications available through Found, including brand-name GLP-1s.
• Integrated with multiple mail-order pharmacy partners via one Photon integration within 2-3 weeks instead of 2-3 months, expanding patient access to affordable, branded and compounded GLP-1 injections.
• Cut 2 hours of unnecessary pharmacy calls each week per prescriber, allowing them to focus on supporting patients on their weight-loss journeys.

In our continued partnership with Found, we are excited to deliver new value and collaborate on innovative solutions to accelerate their profound impact in weight care. 📈

Challenge: Inaccessible and unaffordable weight loss medications caused heavy burdens on Found’s patients and providers.

For many Found patients, supply shortage created near impossible hurdles to finding in-stock brand-name GLP-1s at retail pharmacies. They often visited multiple pharmacies and called back and forth with providers and support teams while searching for available treatments. 

Many felt discouraged and abandoned their weight-loss efforts due to these challenges.

To help, the Found member support team dedicated up to 5 pharmacy calls per patient to find a recommended pharmacy.

Even then, over 15% of prescriptions later needed pharmacy transfers, which caused Found providers and support teams to spend hundreds more hours on the phone to reroute or rewrite prescriptions.

All the additional calls proved unscalable and distracted from patient care.

Finally, many patients faced difficulties affording branded GLP-1s, especially as many health plans did not cover them for weight-loss.

Thus, Found wanted to offer compounded GLP-1s to increase affordability; but to provide this option, they needed to build nationwide mail-order pharmacy integrations, which could take several months.

Found understood the urgent need to make these treatments accessible and affordable while freeing their clinical team to focus on patient care instead of prescription issues.

Solution: Found adopted Photon’s modern prescribing tools and frictionless patient experience.

“One of [Found’s] providers said they needed help because what they were doing felt too easy and they were missing something. Nope, it was really just that easy!” - Dan Ertle, Sr. Manager at Found.

It took just a few days to embed Photon’s modern prescribing workflows into Found’s custom clinical tools. Right away, the prescribing experience felt intuitive for providers, and shortly after, they completely transitioned from DoseSpot to Photon for their prescriptions.

Without having to click out of workflow to prescribe medications, providers could focus better on what mattered: the right medication, dosage, and instructions for their patient.

“We know picking up meds is no one’s favorite thing in the world. So [with Photon] we can take the friction out of those flows.” - Dan Ertle, Sr. Manager at Found.

To empower patients with fulfillment choice and more, Found has utilized Photon’s off-the-shelf, white-label patient experience.

After a prescription is written, Found members receive a text with the prescription and a secure link to a web-based patient application. There, they can compare and select pharmacy locations, get status updates, and change pharmacies at any time.

Photon confirms stock-status and a ready-by time with the pharmacy before notifying patients with a pick-up estimate. If a prior-authorization is required, they'll be notified of possible delays, which is especially valuable for branded GLP-1 prescriptions.

For any issues, like out-of-stock treatments, patients can rely on Photon’s 24/7 customer support or they can use the experience to transfer their prescription to a new pharmacy, all without calling the provider.

Results: Found expanded access and provided affordable treatments to patients, while letting clinical teams focus on patient care.

Found patients now have frictionless access to their prescribed treatments.

“We love that Photon creates such a smooth experience for Found members. …they can bank on avoiding many of the headaches of the typical pharmacy experience that we’re all used to.” - Dan Ertle, Sr. Manager at Found

Now, thanks to visibility and ownership of their prescription, Found patients can avoid unnecessary trips to the pharmacy or calls to their provider.

With smooth medication fulfillment, patients have felt motivated as they continue their weight-loss programs with Found.

Whether they pick the neighborhood Walgreens or delivery from Amazon Pharmacy, patients clearly appreciate the agency made possible by Photon’s technology as adoption skyrocketed: the percentage of Found’s members who choose their own fulfillment option grew 6x in the last year.

With one Photon integration, Found expanded affordable medication access quickly via new mail-order partners.

“Integrations with pharmacies have become a breeze with Photon, which makes it really easy for us to establish a partner network to fit the needs of our member base.” - Dan Ertle, Sr. Manager at Found.

With Photon, Found integrated with several mail-order pharmacies at once within 2-3 weeks. They did not have to redirect several hundred hours from higher impact work to build separate integrations themselves over the course of 2-3 months, which yielded a high return-on-investment. 

Because they integrated with new mail-order pharmacies faster, Found could expedite the launch of their affordable compounded GLP-1 offering by several months, meeting their patients' needs swiftly.

Finally, they can take comfort in knowing that being integrated with Photon frees them from having to allocate additional resources for any future mail-order integrations.

Photon saved Found 2 hours of admin work weekly per prescriber.

Because Photon handled several hundred prescription re-routes each month–including many GLP-1s–and enabled patients to choose their pharmacy with stock-status confirmation, Found prescribers and support teams no longer had to make hundreds of pharmacy calls to find in-stock treatments or handle pharmacy transfers or challenges.

As a result, each Found prescriber got back 2 hours each week–8+ hours monthly–to focus on deeper clinical care for more patients.

Found continues to trust Photon to deliver innovations that move the needle.

"Our partnership feels like we're one team working toward the same goals, and we're excited to continue to grow with them.” - Dan Ertle, Sr. Manager at Found.

Photon shares Found’s commitment to delivering empathetic patient experiences. And with the latest announcement of insurance coverage expansion, Found can rest assured that Photon will provide a frictionless prescription experience that empowers their rapidly growing member base to be informed and confident about their medication fulfillment.

As a trustworthy and proactive partner, we at Photon look forward to accelerating Found’s impact to millions of Americans by removing barriers to scale with our technology.

Whether that means fast-tracking new features that patients need, expanding access to affordable medication, or giving back countless hours to their incredible providers, we are excited to supercharge Found’s journey in providing life-changing weight care for years to come.

➡️ If you think your organization could benefit from Photon, contact our Sales team at sales@photon.health. We look forward to exploring the opportunity together.