When Andy Chan got laid off last winter, he also lost his health insurance. He was suddenly expected to pay $2000 per month for his medications.
Chan knew that wasn’t feasible, but after searching online for alternative pharmacies and brands to purchase from, he was able to reduce the costs of his prescriptions down, remarkably, to $50 per month.
Chan figured he would have to repeat that process prior to every refill—unless there was a way to automate the search. In February 2023, alongside Sean Cannon and Leo Spector, Chan co-founded ScriptScouts: a platform that helps people and businesses find the best prices for their prescription drugs.
“I said, ‘Hey, this is right for automation. Let’s find a better way to do this.’ And that’s how the company was born,” Chan said.
ScriptScouts’ software searches online pharmacies and coupon providers to tell its customers the best place and price at which to fill their prescriptions. The service also transfers patients prescriptions for them when a cheaper price is available at a different pharmacy.
ScriptScouts launched the second iteration of its product this month. With the first iteration, ScriptScouts’ team would manually run the scripts for prescription price searching and within a few hours send a cover letter to customers detailing findings. Now, those scripts will be run in real time, and there will no longer be a delay between a customer entering their prescription information and receiving results.
Chan said medication prices fluctuate daily, and ScriptScouts monitors those prices constantly.
The startup sells to two primary customer bases: individual consumers and companies’ HR departments. Individuals can access ScriptScouts for $5 per month, and businesses pay $100 per employee per year. Chan estimates about 90% of their customers are individuals and 10% are businesses.
So far, ScriptScouts has served over 100 customers and has saved them a collective $10,000 on medications, primarily benefiting customers with chronic conditions such as diabetes or heart disease.
“We’re very mission-driven,” Chan said. “Our mission is to democratize access to life-saving prescription medications, and every day we wake up with that in mind.”
ScriptScouts’ team of about 15 people operates remotely, with Chan based in Wake Forest. The rest of the team, who are all working part-time, are located in Russia, Spain, Mexico, and the U.S.
Quick Bits
Startup: ScriptScouts
Founders: Andy Chan (CEO), Sean Cannon, Leo Spector
Founded: 2023
Location: Chapel Hill
Website: scriptscouts.com
Funding: bootstrapped
Chan said he is “humbled and excited” about the talent he’s found for his company.
“Everybody was super excited about the fact that with every line of code that they were writing, they were literally changing someone’s life,” he said.
The startup has successfully raised friends and family funding and is actively seeking pre-seed investment.
In the next few months, ScriptScouts will expand its search abilities to all 7000-plus prescriptions that are available in the U.S., and will extend services to every zip code in the country. Years down the road, Chan hopes to apply his product to other health services, such as blood work labs and imaging procedures.
ScriptScouts is currently on the lookout for additional talent in the Triangle, and Chan invites people to reach out to him at andy@scriptscouts.com.
