Capital Rx, a pharmacy benefit manager, has acquired care navigation company Amino Health, the companies announced on Wednesday.
New York City-based Capital Rx provides health benefit solutions to carriers, health plans, third-party administrators, employer groups and government entities. Amino Health, based in San Francisco, serves health plans and helps their members make decisions about providers, facilities, procedures and more.
Through the acquisition, Amino Health will become Capital Rx’s care navigation solution called Judi Care. With Judi Care, health plan members will have access to a benefits hub, where they can engage with all their benefits and point solutions. They will also be able to see provider cost and quality data, schedule care, and search for drug benefits. It will support about 60 million covered lives.
“With Amino, we now have a comprehensive suite of services to help employers create, manage, and administer their own benefit plan that goes beyond pharmacy benefits and enables employers to tap us for all the necessary pieces of the employer-sponsored benefits puzzle,” said AJ Loiacono, CEO of Capital Rx, in an email.
He noted that with the acquisition, the company now offers pharmacy benefit services, an underlying infrastructure that allows clients to design benefits programs and a patient-facing navigation solution powered by Amino Health.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Amino Health’s CEO, John Asalone, is joining Capital Rx as executive vice president of Judi Care. The full Amino team is also transitioning to Capital Rx.
Asalone noted that the deal addresses a key challenge for many employers: managing point solutions.
“While some might say that employers don’t mind ad hoc point solutions, the root of the issue isn’t with point solutions,” he said. “Rather, it’s about how administering those point solutions is incredibly cumbersome — making it difficult to manage disjointed benefits, understand if they’re being effectively utilized, see results, and so on.
“Employers need a better underlying technology that allows them to plug and play, adapting their health plan in real time as employee demands and budgets shift. I’m excited to be part of the only company on the market that can say it truly does it all and delivers this experience for employers,” he continued.
By acquiring Amino Health, Capital Rx ultimately aims to create less friction for health plan members and help them navigate to the best and lowest cost care, according to Loiacono. He added that he thinks the company is “well-positioned as a trusted and aligned PBM to support employers and their HR leaders in simplifying the development, management, and administration of a health plan.”
Other transparent pharmacy benefit managers include Abarca and Serve You Rx, while other care navigation companies include Quantum Health and Included Health.
Photo: nespix, Getty Images
