The Origin Story Behind DisclosedRx

March 2020.

The world was shutting down. Offices closed, schools went remote, and no one knew how long it would last.

In the middle of that uncertainty, three people opened the doors on a new kind of PBM.

No outside funding or clients on the books, just a conviction that pharmacy benefits could work differently.

This is the story of how DisclosedRx came to be, and why the timing, as difficult as it was, never shook the founders' resolve.

Leaving a Comfortable Seat

Before DisclosedRx existed, its founders held solid positions at another PBM. Growth was steady. The paycheck was safe. Yet a disagreement kept surfacing: how far should a PBM go for its clients?

The question wouldn't let go. So Ken, Zach, and Dan stepped away from something stable to build something different, a PBM without spread pricing, without withheld rebates, without shell games of any kind.

Launching Into Chaos

Timing rarely cooperates with big decisions.

COVID had turned every business priority upside down. Brokers weren't thinking about switching PBMs; they were figuring out furloughs and remote work, with no sense of what the next month would bring.

Roughly 500 meetings passed before the team signed its first client, effective December 2021.

By January 2022, seven more joined, bringing the first full year to about 8,000 members.

The early days ran on Excel spreadsheets and long hours. There was no system to lean on, only the people willing to build one.

What Full Disclosure Means

The founders didn't want to lean on a buzzword that meant something different to every PBM that used it.

Instead, they anchored to a definition already used by the SEC: every party in a transaction has access to the same information, confirmed by an independent third party rather than taken on faith.

For a PBM, that means clients see the same pricing and rebate data DisclosedRx sees, checked by someone outside the company.

That standard is written directly into every DisclosedRx contract, not left as a marketing promise.

A few principles have guided the company since day one:

• The client pays us, and no one else does

• No spread pricing on any drug, brand or generic

• Every rebate passed through in full

• A single admin fee, disclosed and understood upfront

  
  

ERISA prevents a PBM from serving as a plan's fiduciary directly, so DisclosedRx extended that same duty through contract instead, promising clients that every decision would be made with their interests, and their members' interests, first.

Six Years Later

DisclosedRx has grown every year since that first small client list, without ever taking on outside investment.

The founders wanted to control their own direction, free from investors pushing for faster returns at the expense of service or price.

What started with three people and a shared frustration with an industry built on complexity has become a company proving that a Fiduciary PBM can grow, and grow quickly, without compromising the promise that got it started.

DisclosedRx operates as The Fully Disclosed PBM®, holding to the same commitment that opened its doors in March 2020.