Today is an exciting day for all of us at TailorMed and Vivor. We’re proud to announce that our companies are joining forces to advance our shared mission: to remove financial barriers to care.
We both started our companies with a drive and a passion to help patients avoid the financial toxicity of a serious medical diagnosis. Through our own personal journeys, we recognized that healthcare in the United States has become increasingly unaffordable—and that patients and their families are suffering devastating consequences.
Sadly, in the years since TailorMed and Vivor’s founding, the economic burden of care has only gotten worse. In a recent Gallup survey, nearly one in five U.S. adults—a whopping 46 million people—reported that if they needed access to high-quality healthcare today, they wouldn’t be able to pay for it. The same percentage also reported that someone in their household skipped care for cost reasons in the past year.
For those with serious and chronic conditions, the expenses can be astronomical. High costs have been linked to poor medical adherence and treatment delays in patients with arthritis, kidney disease, diabetes, and cancer, resulting in increased hospitalizations and other negative health outcomes.
Patients’ inability to afford their care also places a heavy burden on providers and pharmacies. Last year, unpaid healthcare bills reached $140 billion, amounting to one of the largest sources of debt for Americans. For healthcare organizations, the likelihood of recovering these debts is extremely low—and many are fighting to survive due to uncompensated care and bad debt.
At this time of unprecedented financial pressure on patients and healthcare organizations, we’ve decided that the best way forward is together. Through our combined efforts, we will accelerate our ability to develop innovative solutions and help more patients access the care they need.
A Proactive Approach
While most patients with a high-cost diagnosis are eligible for financial assistance, only one in five receive it. While we didn’t realize it at the time, when each of us founded our companies, we asked ourselves the same question: “How can we change these statistics?” In the case of both TailorMed and Vivor, we knew that the answer required a proactive approach.
Typically, when patients need financial aid, they depend on referrals from members of their medical team. All too often, those with the highest risk of financial toxicity slip through the cracks and silently suffer the consequences. Even when patients are identified, the process of finding and enrolling them in financial resources has historically been manual, cumbersome, and inefficient.
We realized that technology could play a critical role in transforming a reactive, burdensome process into a proactive, automated one.
Our platforms have done just that. At TailorMed, we first launched our Financial Navigation software, which enables healthcare organizations to identify patients in need, investigate and optimize their benefits, project their out-of-pocket costs, and analyze and enroll them in various forms of aid. Next, we introduced our Financial Insights solution, which tracks the performance of financial navigation programs and produces valuable metrics for providers. We followed up with our Pharmacy platform to streamline the process of enrollment and tracking for free and replacement drug programs. And most recently, we created TailorMed Complete, pairing our pioneering technology with our expert financial navigators to ensure that patients and providers achieve the best possible outcomes.
At Vivor, our financial assistance software has achieved similar aims by automating screening, search, and enrollment processes; streamlining provider workflows; and delivering powerful and flexible reporting. We’ve partnered with some of the most innovative pharmaceutical companies, which led us to create our Express Enroll capability. Express Enroll significantly reduces the time required to enroll patients in assistance programs offered by these companies.
Over the years, our solutions have made a real impact. TailorMed and Vivor’s systems are being used today across a combined 900 healthcare facilities. Together, our companies have secured $1 billion for patients from more than 5,000 assistance programs, covering more than 1,000 chronic conditions.
Moving Mountains for Patients, Together
We first met in 2016, when each of us was in the early stages of building our respective companies. We then watched as both organizations achieved impressive results, building teams and technology that have made a real difference in the lives of patients across the U.S. We could never have predicted such an amazing level of progress, which we owe to the dedication, talent, and hard work of our growing teams. Today, we’re proud of all that our teams have achieved, but we know that we can do so much more. By coming together as one entity, we’ll be able to take our critical work to the next level.
Through TailorMed's acquisition of Vivor, we’ll create the largest network on the market of providers, pharmacies, and life science companies—all of whom will benefit from our cutting-edge products and combined reach. Our likeminded teams will have the resources they need to expand the capabilities of our technology and broaden our network even further. As we continue to grow, we will look for ways to develop and implement new, innovative solutions to empower everyone we serve—from industry partners to providers and most importantly, to the patients themselves. At the same time, we will remain committed to the high-quality, industry-leading customer service for which both companies are known.
As we look ahead to the future, we couldn’t be more optimistic about working toward our common purpose. Above all, we won’t lose sight of what motivated us to start our companies in the first place: our belief that everyone, regardless of their financial circumstances, should have access to the care they need. There’s a lot more work to be done, but together, we know we can make our shared vision a reality.
Srulik Dvorsky
Co-Founder and CEO, TailorMed
Ian Manners
Co-Founder and CEO, Vivor
