In this episode of the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, host Steven Schwartz interviews Andrea Sebaihi, an expert in providing medication access and affordability for concierge medical and Direct Primary Care (DPC) practices through ManifestRx. They discuss how ManifestRx operates, the benefits it offers to both practices and patients, and share success stories of how it has positively impacted DPC practices. The conversation also touches on marketing strategies for growth in the healthcare sector and concludes with insights on supporting practices in their mission to improve healthcare delivery.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Concierge Medicine and Pharmacists’ Role
03:20 The Impact of Pharmacists in Direct Primary Care
06:23 Financial Benefits of Integrating Pharmacists
09:29 Future of Direct Primary Care and Concierge Medicine
12:04 Building Relationships in Healthcare
15:17 Conclusion and Resources for Physicians and Pharmacists
 

Steven Schwartz (00:24)
Hello and welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Steven Schwartz, and today it’s truly my pleasure to welcome Andrea Sebaihi and he is an expert on helping concierge medical and DPC practices get medication available into their practices for their patients. Andrea, thank you for being with us today.

Andrea Sebaihi (00:49)
Yeah, thanks, Steven. Appreciate you having me.

Steven Schwartz (00:51)
Yeah, totally. Let’s jump right in. First of all, tell us a little bit more about the company you’re with, how long you’ve been there and what you do.

Andrea Sebaihi (00:59)
Yeah, absolutely. So ManifestRx, a Revive Health company, been here now directing sales in the DPC market for about four years now. And really simply we provide medication affordability and access to practices that are either looking to provide elevated benefits to their members through their membership fees or provide more affordability and access to the prescriptions.

Steven Schwartz (01:27)
All right, so how does it work exactly? Let’s say I’m a DPC practice, maybe I have 400 or 500 patients and looking for a better way to get medication to my patients. How does this look? How does it work?

Andrea Sebaihi (01:40)
Yeah,

right. So, you know, we become an embedded benefit within the practice. You know, some practices may offer labs, different types of tests. This pharmacy program becomes an embedded benefit of being a member of said practice. We partner directly with the DPCs and build the DPCs on a per member per month fee schedule. Typically that ranges from four to seven dollars. We’re inclusive of the entire population and through that four to seven dollars,

The providers providing access to two main components of our ManifestRx DPC Pharmacy Program. One’s gonna be for chronic disease maintenance medications through our mail order pharmacy. It’s gonna, formula is gonna account for 95 % of the top prescribed generics in the country, mostly 90 day supply. And all of those medications are gonna be shipped for free to all 50 states also with no co-pays associated with them.

Steven Schwartz (02:35)
Alright, hang on a second. Time out. Did you just say shipped for free with no co-pays? Alright, people are going be listening to this thing. Alright, come on Andrea. Tell me what’s the deal because how do do this for free?

Andrea Sebaihi (02:37)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Right. you know, when I went back just before and said, try to be inclusive of the population, right? We understand that a patient panel of let’s call it 500, you may have some heavy utilizing members within that population that are on four or five, six, seven maintenance medications. So for us being inclusive of the entire, entire patient panel, we’re able to kind of dilute our risk across the patient panel and the utilization that we may see from some of those higher utilizers and some of those.

lower utilizers.

Steven Schwartz (03:19)
That’s so awesome. And I imagine for the patients, they’re loving it because if they’ve come from a traditional insurance-based medical primary care practice, they’re going to get prescribed when they finally get to see their doctor. It gets sent into their, what, Walgreens or CVS or Walmart or whatever. They have to wait for it to get filled. They have to then go there and stand in line, pay for it, take it home. That’s the traditional way, correct?

Andrea Sebaihi (03:46)
Right, so with Manifest Rx, we’re taking something that was a variable cost for some people and may be a burden on their lifestyle, right? Going to the pharmacy and not knowing what prescription may be for 90-day supplies, we’re making that a fixed cost. And then also, it’s a proven stat up there through surveys and research that receiving medication through mail order has increased adherence across the board for patients.

Steven Schwartz (04:11)
Yeah, it sounds like such a great concept that you’re doing. How long has ManifestRx been doing this arrangement?

Andrea Sebaihi (04:23)
Right. So we founded ManifestRx in early 2021 as a cash pay generic solution for, you know, really anybody within the United States that was looking for cost saving solutions. We quickly learned and started speaking with others in the DPC market and started kind of researching what the DPC market was, how it operated, their fee schedule, and really the values behind it.

Our main goal in starting Manifest was to provide affordability and access to medications. And that aligned really nicely with the DPC market. So that’s really where we came to formulate the SED program we have today on a subscription-based model, kind of removing barriers of any cost past that PMPM fee that’s associated with the program.

Steven Schwartz (05:10)
Very cool. How does it work out with some of the trendy medications that are going on right now as far as like Ozempic is one very popular medicine? Is that included? Is it not included? And how is that dealt with?

Andrea Sebaihi (05:25)
Right. So, you know, the core ManifestRx program that we’re providing and partnering with DPCs is a generic only program. Outside of that, as a whole, with our expertise and, you know, alongside our parent company Revive, we do have access to do a couple different things in terms of brand name and specialty medications. So if there’s a population that would like to enroll in a sourcing program with us, we do analyze claims.

and medications utilized by a population and see if we’re able to source them through a partner pharmacy. In terms of weight loss medications, super exciting at Revive this year, 1-1-25, we launched our weight health program. So that’s gonna comprise of physicians, health coaches, fitness, nutritionists, but also a medication weight loss program associated with that. More generic first approach too.

Steven Schwartz (06:21)
Very cool, and is that available to consumers as well or is that just through the medical practices?

Andrea Sebaihi (06:27)
So both to revive in the manifest pharmacy programs in our virtual care solutions are group-based solutions, not direct to consumer.

Steven Schwartz (06:39)
All right. Yeah, this is great. So many amazing options here. I know that people remember stories so much better than ways of learning information that are not through stories. Do you have any stories that you can share with our listeners of how coming in, say, partnership with your company has really made a huge difference in their practice, their

profitability, their stress level, any anecdotes or stories you can share on that.

Andrea Sebaihi (07:15)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s so many to speak to, um, you know, off the top of my head, you know, we really became partners with these DPCs for a reason. You know, DPC docs became DPC docs for a reason, right? They wanted to leave the system, provide, um, longer care, better care, create real relationships with their patients, um, for better health outcomes. They didn’t become DPC docs to become pharmacists or anything like that. So.

We’ve been able to partner with a ton of practices and really, you know, take off that load of them of maybe they had a pharmacy at one point and they weren’t able to really run their practice so efficiently. So we were able to take that load over for them and really drive down costs associated with that pharmacy they were running. but we’ve had practices utilize our program in a multitude of ways. you know, small practices that are looking to differentiate themselves and maybe a local region from other practices.

Being able to provide free medications is a real leg up and we’ve seen a lot of practices Utilize it not only as a marketing tool, but as a sales tool Going into employers and bidding on employer business and trying to win those accounts over and grow membership that way We’ve seen practices create revenue streams through our program, you know, our fees are our fees to the practice But that doesn’t mean if the business model or margins allow that If they can fit it into their membership fees

They definitely can do that and we’ve seen that happen before.

Steven Schwartz (08:41)
Very cool. I like how you make it simple for the physician’s office to work with you to simplify and streamline the whole process of getting these medications to the patient. We’ve talked about mail order and if someone needs a medic medication immediately, an antibiotic or whatnot, do you ship it to them overnight or they go to a local pharmacy perhaps or how does that work?

Andrea Sebaihi (09:10)
Yeah. So going back to like the real main two components of the program. So you have the mail order section, which is thousand generic maintenance medications. those are shipped for free and no copay. then, you know, same day pick up if you have an urgent care need for an amoxicillin or, you know, a topical steroid or something like that, that you need same day. We have one of the largest pharmacy retail pharmacy networks in the country. It’s about 70,000 retail pharmacy. think, you know,

Publix, Walgreens, CVS, Costco, Rite Aid, all those pharmacies that the member can go in and pick up about 75 urgent care medications for free as well at the local retail pharmacy.

Steven Schwartz (09:49)
Really, really like this. I think a lot of physicians who may be listening to this, if they don’t already have some sort of arrangement for helping their patients get medication, your company sounds like an amazing option for them to look into. How would someone get in touch with you directly if they have questions, they want to discuss this in further detail?

Andrea Sebaihi (10:14)
Yeah, so they can visit manifestrx.com in the contact button, my email and phone numbers there. Directly here, you know, I can be reached on my cell at 203-449-4255 or by looking me up on LinkedIn and connecting.

Steven Schwartz (10:30)
Very cool. And what have you found as the best way for you as a representative of this company in your marketing to find additional doctors to become your clients or partners for your company?

Andrea Sebaihi (10:46)
Really the face-to-face has been the best for us. So, know, we go to Health Rosetta, U Powered, DPC Summit, the HIN Summit has been a really powerful tool for us. At the end of the day, we’re interacting with clinicians, right? And the face-to-face time is really great to be able to sit down and understand the value that they may need or the solution they need and kind of put the pieces together there in person.

Steven Schwartz (11:10)
Very cool. In-person events are so powerful. I attended the Concierge Medical Forum in Cumming, Georgia this past October and loved it. Met so many amazing physicians and their team members. And it was great. just met so many folks, learned so much, and have created some really great relationships. I encourage physicians who are in this space to find and attend.

these kind of events because there’s so much value in meeting a person, a vendor, a company face to face and getting a chance to sit down and really dig into the details.

Andrea Sebaihi (11:51)
Absolutely. I mean, when we first started this, you know, we started going to these conferences to start to learn more about kind of the market and the types of individuals we’d be working with and serving. you know, fast forward four years, we have some really deep relationships and some friendships that we’ve created over this time. So it’s been a great journey.

Steven Schwartz (12:10)
Nice. My company is Concierge Medical Marketing. And through that, obviously, we help concierge and DPC practices with their digital marketing to help them achieve their goals, whatever those goals may be. And at our company, we have three different distinct programs. The first is helping transition an existing practice from a traditional insurance-based practice to a concierge, DPC, cash pay.

membership practice. There’s certain marketing techniques that have to happen there to do that successfully. The second is growth. For example, if a practice has 20, 30, 50, 100 membership patients and they want to get to the magic 300 number or 400, wherever they want to go, we have growth techniques available to them. And finally, for those offices and practices that have a full panel and maybe even a wait list already, they need help with nurture. The idea that

We reach out to the patients and keep the practice in their mind. For example, emails, text messages, having, excuse me, having events where people get together, get a chance to spend time with the doctor, meet other patients, have wine and cheese and music, and maybe learn about something new with health or fitness or diet or gut health or whatever the topic might be.

At Concierge Medical Marketing, we help our clients with these things. And that’s why I wanted to ask you, based on your experience, how you find your marketing works best to achieve your goals and growth for your company.

Andrea Sebaihi (13:50)
Great.

Steven Schwartz (13:50)
So great. Well, as we wrap up our interview here today, Andrea, do you have any final thoughts, any final comments, anything you want to share with our audience before we go?

Andrea Sebaihi (14:00)
Not really, know, at end of the day, we’re, you know, we’re trying to support these practices and their growth and the mission that they’re trying to drive and changing healthcare in the U.S. I will say, you know, outside of our core pharmacy program at Revive, we’ve been able to support and provide value in a multitude of ways through our virtual care clinic that we’re also providing. you know, outside of our pharmacy only program that’s driven in the DPC market,

If physicians are interested in learning more about maybe urgent care telemedicine or mental health or behavioral health program for their members, we’d be open to talking about those as well.

Steven Schwartz (14:41)
Nice, give

us your phone number one more time before we wrap this up, please.

Andrea Sebaihi (14:45)
Absolutely. 203-449-4255.

Steven Schwartz (14:50)
All right, cool.

Well, again, Andrea Sebaihi thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing your stories and helping us all learn more about what your company offers with making it super easy for the patients to get their medication, again, shipped to their door for free as part of their membership with their DPC. I think that’s a fantastic business plan and it seems like things are growing and doing well. So I’m really proud of you and your whole company.

Andrea Sebaihi (15:16)
Thanks, Steven, I appreciate you having me.

Steven Schwartz (15:18)
Yeah, totally. This has been Steve Schwartz with the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast and we will see you next time. Please follow, like, subscribe wherever podcasts are and our posts around the internet. We appreciate you helping elevate healthcare for everybody and we’re glad to have you along on this journey. Take care.