Doctors Agree: GoodRx Is the Best Way to Save

Most Americans don’t need to read the headlines to know that prescription medicines cost too much. They feel it every day in their wallets, and in the struggle to pay for expensive drugs, month after month.

Since GoodRx started seven years ago, more and more Americans have learned that drug prices can vary widely, and they’ve come to realize that having health insurance doesn’t guarantee affordable prescriptions. Along the way, new websites and apps have popped up to promise Americans all sorts of saving on their healthcare.

So what’s the best way to find savings on a patient’s prescriptions?

Before we get to any conclusions, it’s worth highlighting a key difference between GoodRx and many other services. GoodRx gathers available prices and discounts for every prescription at every pharmacy in the US. Altogether, we have collected billions of prices and discounts – so we don’t just offer one price set by one partner. When a patient uses GoodRx, they tap into all of these ways to save, and they can then decide for themselves where they want to buy their medications, and at what cost, before they head to the pharmacy. That transparency means more choice and lower prices.

We’re excited to report that independent experts agree that GoodRx is the best way to save. In the latest issue of the Journal for American Academy of Dermatology, a leading academic journal for dermatologists, two Ohio researchers examined prices from 3 discount services, including GoodRx, for 21 commonly prescribed dermatologic medications (such as tetracyclines like doxycycline and minocycline, and topical meds like adapalene and triamcinolone).

The researchers compared our prices with two other discount programs, and the news was good for us, and for our customers. The researchers found that GoodRx offered the best prices by far – nearly three times cheaper than Blink Health prices and one-and-a-half times cheaper than SingleCare prices. (To be clear, this research was done completely independently. We learned of it after publication, and we have not spoken to the authors.)

In their letter, the researchers reached a strong and clear conclusion: “GoodRx is the superior application for finding the cheapest medication costs among the 3 applications studied,” they write. “GoodRx appears to offer the overall greatest savings among the most popular apps.”

This finding isn’t just good news for patients – the researchers also believe that GoodRx can help physicians deliver better care, and save time. In a note, Dr. Matthew Zirwas, the Ohio dermatologist who led the analysis, explained that, by using GoodRx and other services, “I estimate that my office has needed to hire one less office staff member and that I save about 1-2 hours of my time per week. Even better, there is no question that these companies improve primary adherence (defined as the patient actually getting the prescription from the pharmacy) while strengthening the patient-doctor relationship and saving patients money.”

At GoodRx, we try to stay humble, but it makes us proud when independent experts agree with us that GoodRx is both the best place for patients to save – and also helps doctors improve their practices. Many doctors don’t know about GoodRx, and the more they learn about us from their peers and colleagues, the more likely they’ll be to recommend us to their patients. That helps us, and it helps the patients.