How Sesame launched new treatment programs without increasing support costs with Photon

“Photon shares our consumer-first philosophy, making a complex task easier for our patients and their families and enabling us to provide convenient care at scale.” - Dr. Michael Botta, Co-Founder and President of Sesame

Sesame is a healthcare marketplace that has provided affordable, high-quality healthcare to hundreds of thousands of Americans. Without worrying about insurance, surprise bills, or long wait times, patients can access primary care physicians across urgent care and specialties such as weight management, sexual health, mental health, and more, for same-day virtual or in-person appointments.

Sharing its commitment to transparency and accessible care, Photon has helped Sesame realize its mission at scale. With Photon, Sesame:

• Achieved a 71% reduction in prescription support requests, allowing it to launch new programs without growing its support team.
• Launched affordable weight-loss programs, which depended on custom mail-order pharmacy integrations that Photon unlocked.
• Drove an 8x increase in conversion rate to a partner pharmacy and supported thousands with picking up in-stock medications, including GLP-1s.

As a trusted innovation partner, Photon looks forward to delivering exceptional experiences for Sesame providers, patients, and partners in years to come.

Opportunity: Sesame aimed to launch and scale new programs quickly, which included end-to-end medication fulfillment.

As Sesame grew, its providers and support teams believed there was a potential burden of pharmacy transfers: many may have been caused by the patient’s “preferred”  pharmacy requirement in a previous prescribing tool that providers used.

Prescription (Rx) fulfillment accounted for a growing portion of patient support requests, causing its support teams to spend many hours transferring Rxs, calling pharmacies, and more - time Sesame preferred to allocate elsewhere.

Thus, Sesame sought Photon–a partner to help increase the efficiency of prescription management and further guarantee smooth medication fulfillment for patients: many needed medication ASAP after their primary and urgent care visits with Sesame.

Sesame also sought support to build integrations with mail-order pharmacies quickly–integrations that unlocked medication access for the launch of a major new treatment program: weight loss.

Finally, after launching an exclusive partnership with a Fortune 500 company, Sesame wanted to ensure that new patients from the partner would have exceptional patient experiences, including Rx fulfillment.

Solution: Sesame adopted Photon’s Rx platform and text-based patient experience.

“There’s a mutual investment in continuously improving the experience for both patients and providers.” - Chelsea Katz, Director of Provider and Partnership Operations at Sesame

Sesame embedded Photon’s modern prescribing workflows into their custom clinical tools. Now, all Sesame providers use Photon for patient prescriptions.

Photon easily enabled custom prescribing flows, so providers could choose from a defined formulary with programmatic routing logic to send medications to particular pharmacies.

Plus, they could avoid the headaches of an outdated ePrescribe tool and focus better on taking care of their patients' broad range of treatment needs.

“Photon makes a complex task easier for our patients and their families.” - Dr. Michael Botta, Co-Founder and President of Sesame

When considering a new prescribing partner, Sesame chose Photon for the superior patient experience. With Photon, Sesame has empowered their patients with ownership of their prescription and choice of pharmacy.

After a prescription (Rx) is written, patients receive an SMS/text with the Rx and a secure link to a webpage. There, they can compare and select pharmacy locations, get status updates, and change pharmacies anytime.

Photon confirms stock status and estimated ready time with the pharmacy before texting patients to confirm they can pick up their medication. If a prior authorization is required, they'll be notified of possible delays before they wait 30 minutes in the pharmacy line and learn, “It’s not covered by your insurance."

For any issues, like out-of-stock medications, patients can count on Photon’s 24/7 text support or use the secure link to reroute Rxs to another pharmacy without contacting providers.

Results: Photon enabled Sesame to expand customized patient experiences and treatments rapidly by removing operational burdens.

Sesame saw a 71% reduction in Rx support requests after using Photon.

“We’ve measured a 71% decrease in prescription support requests after integrating with Photon.” - Michael Botta, Co-Founder and President of Sesame

In less than six months, Sesame saw a 71% reduction in prescription-related issues handled by their support team, even as their team launched new patient programs and saw an increase in overall prescription volume.

As a result, Sesame could maintain the same level of customer support investment during this period of rapid expansion.

Photon also helped save time for providers, cutting asynchronous patient-provider interactions on prescription questions.

Sesame’s team no longer had to spend time on phone calls and related admin work to resolve pharmacy issues.

Now, providers and support teams could redirect their focus towards offering personalized, high-quality care to the many new patients who now relied on Sesame.

Sesame launched new affordable treatment programs with compounded medication, thanks to Photon integrations.

“We want to ensure that patients have access to affordable medication, and Photon helps us do that.” - Chelsea Katz, Director of Provider and Partnership Operations at Sesame

Photon enabled Sesame to launch a weight loss subscription program that included affordable medication like compounded GLP-1s.

In one Photon integration, Sesame unlocked access to mail-order, compounding pharmacies (with 503A/B designations). As a result, Sesame could prescribe customized treatment for each patient at significantly lower prices than competitor offerings, meeting the needs of their largely uninsured and underinsured patient base.

Since these programs began, monthly mail-order prescriptions tripled, signifying a clear patient demand that Sesame met successfully, thanks to Photon.

And, if patients needed non-compounded medication, Sesame could rest assured that Photon enabled easy Rx pick-up at retail pharmacies—something their competitors did not offer.

Sesame drove 8x conversion to a partner pharmacy while delighting new patients with positive pharmacy experiences.

Just two days after Sesame integrated with Photon, it launched a new partnership with a Fortune 500 company, confident that it could offer seamless medication fulfillment.

Sesame provided all new patients from this partner with pharmacy choice and medication status. Patients felt supported as they navigated out-of-stock issues at retail pharmacies, using Photon to transfer Rxs and find available medication if needed.

Furthermore, catering to patient preferences, Photon developed a feature that placed a partner pharmacy at the top of patients’ pharmacy options. During the feature’s initial pilot, patients valued this personalization immensely, showing an 8x increase in conversion rate for the partner pharmacy.

As a result, Sesame drove significant prescription volume to the partner pharmacy and customized the experience for their partner.

Sesame trusts Photon as an agile and proactive innovation partner.

“Photon’s not just creating a better prescription experience—they’re creating helpful innovations for us that we don’t have the luxury to even think about.” - Chelsea Katz, Director of Provider and Partnership Operations at Sesame

Previously, Sesame had not received dedicated vendor support for custom requests, often waiting days for replies. But, since working with Photon, Sesame has experienced near-instant resolution to flagged issues. We feel honored to be a trusted partner that responds quickly and thoroughly to their needs.

Beyond just a high level of support, Sesame has depended on Photon to develop customizations for their evolving needs and workflows. As Sesame has innovated and scaled, we have been lucky to collaborate closely on new experiences that drive new value to patients, prescribers, and partners.

Aligned with Sesame’s mission, we aim to enable price transparency for their patients in the near future, so they can save money on prescription medications. We feel excited to realize our shared vision to make healthcare transparent and affordable to all Americans in the long run.

➡️ 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.