Redefining drug access: How the Direct Marketplace helps transform sustainable drug pricing, patient affordability, and innovation
By: Prescryptive Health
For decades, the U.S. drug distribution model has depended on a complex web of intermediaries — pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), aggregators, and other middlemen — that have separated sustainable innovation from patient impact. While these channels were designed to manage complexity, they now contribute to friction, opacity, and inflated costs across the system. Employers pay more, manufacturers lose direct visibility into the value their therapies deliver, and patients struggle to understand their options and afford their medications.
A new model is emerging — one that helps restore transparency, control, and affordability across the healthcare ecosystem. Direct-to-market ecosystems like the Prescryptive-Powered™ Direct Pharma Marketplace connect manufacturers, patients, and payers through a single, intelligent digital infrastructure. By replacing structural interference with real-time, direct connections through neutral infrastructure, manufacturers can help set sustainable, transparent prices, ensure compliance, and improve access for patients.
This article explores how direct pharma marketplaces are transforming drug pricing, distribution, and patient affordability — and how Prescryptive’s platform is redefining what it means to go direct in healthcare.
The traditional pharmaceutical distribution model has become unsustainable
And that old model is doing exactly what it was designed to do: maximize intermediary profit. Handoffs in the legacy chain contribute toward costs, slowed therapy initiation, and manufacturer distance from the patients and employers they serve.
Transparency is the first casualty. Manufacturers have limited visibility into how discounts and rebates are applied, while employers and patients often pay inflated prices that bear little resemblance to a drug’s true net cost. Value is routed through layers of middlemen — PBMs, aggregators, and maximizers — each extracting fees that distort pricing and block innovation.
The impact:
- Patients lose access due to high out-of-pocket costs and administrative delays.
- Employers and plan sponsors overspend because of opaque contracting structures.
- Manufacturers lose control over brand integrity and cannot ensure their affordability programs reach the right people.
As a result, the ecosystem designed to deliver health outcomes now can limit them. Patients are left in the middle — disconnected from affordable therapies and meaningful support. Sustainable access depends on rebuilding these connections. A direct-to-market ecosystem removes unnecessary barriers, ensuring that pricing, access, and experience are aligned around patient needs — not intermediary profit.
What is the Direct Pharma Marketplace?
The Direct Pharma Marketplace is a connected ecosystem that links manufacturers directly to the market — eliminating the opacity and inefficiency of traditional channels. In Prescryptive’s model, the marketplace powers two complementary paths: direct-to-business and direct-to-patient, creating one unified infrastructure for sustainable medication access.
Through this marketplace, manufacturers can:
- Control pricing and set direct net prices that improve patient affordability.
- Help ensure compliance through real-time patient authorization and verification.
- Mitigate duplicate discount risk with claim-level visibility.
- Maintain brand consistency across the patient journey.
Unlike the traditional system that routes value through intermediaries, the Direct Pharma Marketplace creates a transparent flow of pricing, savings, and support from the manufacturer to the patient. Manufacturers can set and manage net pricing, ensuring that every concession or copay assistance dollar reaches its intended recipient.
The result is a sustainable marketplace — one that aligns incentives among manufacturers, employers, and patients, delivering affordability while sustaining innovation. Through Prescryptive’s intelligent digital infrastructure, stakeholders can act on real-time data, streamline contracting, and expand patient access — without structural interference.
Manufacturers benefit in a direct ecosystem
In the Direct Pharma Marketplace, manufacturers regain control over the three pillars of sustainable access: pricing, visibility, and brand integrity. Ultimately, these benefits converge to achieve a single outcome: more patients accessing therapies sustainably and affordably, supported by data-driven precision.
Pricing Control & Brand Integrity
Manufacturers can set direct net prices and define contractual terms that preserve value. This model helps eliminate traditional PBM interference, enabling manufacturers to control how their products are priced, distributed, and supported. The ability to “put a direct price in market” helps ensure that affordability programs are visible and effective where it matters most — at the pharmacy counter.
Increased Data & Performance Visibility
Prescryptive’s platform provides claim-level transparency across transactions, offering real-time insight into pricing, copay performance, and patient engagement. Manufacturers can measure the direct impact of affordability programs, evaluate distribution efficiency, and refine commercial strategies in a closed feedback loop.
Compliance & Patient Consent
By controlling the digital infrastructure rather than outsourcing it to legacy intermediaries, manufacturers can sustain compliance while lowering operational cost. The patient consents, and this is verified in real time on a HIPAA compliant platform.
Increased access supports Employer and Plan Sponsor goals
Employers and plan sponsors are essential partners in ensuring sustainable access to medications. Through direct-to-business connections, the Prescryptive marketplace enables transparent, net-price contracting that improves gross-to-net performance while reducing plan costs.
Transparent Pricing, Real Savings
By setting direct net prices, manufacturers can deliver predictable cost structures that employers can rely on. The marketplace helps ensure that savings flow directly to plan sponsors and patients, eliminating distortion from opaque rebate models.
Tied to Value, Not Volume
The direct marketplace aligns incentives around real-world outcomes. Employers gain visibility into drug spend performance, empowering them to design benefits that promote affordability without sacrificing quality or innovation.
Sustainable Economics
Dollars flow through a transparent, auditable system that supports cost efficiency and market sustainability. The results help create a win-win for employers and patients: reduced costs, improved adherence, and greater access to the therapies that drive long-term health.
Infrastructure and scalability through the digital prescription
Prescryptive’s intelligent digital infrastructure and our digital prescription solution allows prescribers, pharmacists, employers, health systems, and pharma manufacturers to connect to patients in new ways through their prescriptions.
That’s because before the first fill, Prescryptive’s digital prescription:
- Enables pricing access and formulary compliance, with pharmacy choice for savings.
- Captures data to improve the patient experience and patient engagement.
- Connects patients to other care solutions earlier to enhance care and outcomes.
The digital prescription gets the patient back in the prescription workflow, helping reduce administrative delays and offering ownership and choice to the patient via their mobile phone. What’s more, Prescryptive’s architecture can integrate seamlessly with established pharmacy networks and systems, scaling access initiatives efficiently.
This technology backbone transforms access from a fragmented process into a unified, data-driven ecosystem — built for sustainability and speed.
Future outlook: Sustainable innovation and market transformation
The shift toward direct pharma marketplaces represents more than a new distribution model — it’s a structural realignment of incentives. Policy movements around drug pricing transparency and value-based reimbursement are accelerating this change, rewarding manufacturers that deliver measurable patient outcomes through efficient, direct channels.
As more stakeholders adopt direct-to-market ecosystems, the pharmaceutical industry is evolving so that affordability and innovation are no longer tradeoffs. Manufacturers that embrace this transformation can help drive both economic efficiency and equitable access, ensuring therapies reach patients faster, at the right price, and with long-term impact.
This is the future of pharma: digital, transparent, and connected — where every stakeholder benefits, and every patient gains.