Health and Human Services (HHS) National Coordinator for Health IT Dr. Thomas Keane on Thursday explained to Breitbart News how the Trump administration’s new real-time prescription benefit technology rule could save patients hundreds of dollars per month and prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans that do not fill prescriptions due to high drug prices.
Healthcare costs typically rank among the highest economic concerns for most Americans, with just under half of American adults saying that it is difficult to afford healthcare costs, and 43 percent of adults saying they have not taken their prescription in the past year due to costs.
Drug prices often vary wildly by health plan, pharmacy benefit design, and patient status.
Out-of-pocket drug spending has reached a record $98 billion in 2024, increasing 25 percent between 2019 and 2024. Even worse, patients often do not know the cost of a drug when being prescribed, often getting sticker shock at the pharmacy counter and never fill their prescriptions, leading to worse health outcomes and greater costs down the line. Failure to take medications claims the lives of 125,000 Americans annually and costs the healthcare industry as much as $300 billion per year.
Here is where the Trump administration brings in a proposal to fix this.
Dr. Thomas Keane, as the HHS National Coordinator for Health IT, is leading a policy through HHS that would mandate that all certified health information technology (IT) platforms support real-time prescription benefit technology by the end of 2027. This would allow prescribers to see, at the time of prescription, how much a particular drug and its alternatives would cost a particular patient.
Keane told Breitbart News, “Over the last summer, we adopted what we called real time prescription benefit functionality in electronic health records [EHR]. What we did is we mandate that any health record that wants to be certified has to toward functionality that allows the doctor, at the time of prescribing, to see what the cost of the drug they’ve chosen is going to be for a particular patient, and also what the cost of therapeutically equivalent alternatives are.”
Watch — HHS National Coordinator for Health IT Thomas Keane Says Real-Time Drug Pricing Can Save Up to 125,000 People A Year
He said, hypothetically, if a doctor were prescribing an anti-inflammatory drug, the rule would allow for a doctor to “choose a therapy that is appropriate and that I can actually afford, and that functionality we mandated.”
Keane added that the adoption of this technology has been much more “rapid” because insurance companies have an incentive to ensure that patients are receiving the lowest cost prescription for their healthcare needs.
He said that patients will save massive amounts on their prescription drugs, according to data they have reviewed.
“For routine prescriptions, it’s about $42 a month. For diabetes medicines, it’s about $135 a month. And for specialty medicines, it’s about $800 per month for each medicine,” he revealed.
Keane explained this reform helps restore a market mechanism, giving patients a real understanding of their healthcare costs.
“The savings are substantial. It’s very powerful getting this information. I mean, think about it. When you go shopping on Amazon, you can shop for the cheaper product, or when you go to the store. That’s never really been true in healthcare until now. So, and it’s, you know, it’s really been a focus of the Trump administration,” Keane said.
“The Republican administration says, ‘We want healthcare to operate as a market.’ And, what do you need for a market? You need prices, you need supply, and then you need, you know, quality checks, right? You and I, when we go buy a car, we can shop for price. There’s all kinds of things that will tell us about the quality of the car. We get Consumer Reports. We get the car facts. So the Republican administrators are really organized around creating markets for these and so that’s why, you know, my agency and myself were charged with getting prices available to patients.”
Watch — HHS National Coordinator for Health IT Says Trump Administration Focused on Creating Fair Healthcare Pricing
And it is just not to display the lowest cost based on the healthcare plan either, Keane said.
He noted that HHS is working to ensure that a doctor could see if a patient could save money by paying the cash price for a drug instead of getting the drug through the patient’s health insurance plan. Keane said that pharmacy benefit managers such as GoodRx work to lower drug costs, and that TrumpRx has “drugs that are among the cheapest that you can get.”
Keane said the reason that this technology has not yet been available to patients is because of price obscurity, or because many healthcare industries benefit from patients’ inability to know they could save with other prescriptions. He added that this technology became easier to adopt as more healthcare providers starting adopting electronic health records.
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