A perfect purchase still loses money if reimbursement lands below it.
SureCost is good at a genuinely hard problem, and the savings are real. Buying well across multiple wholesalers, staying compliant with your primary vendor and GPO terms and keeping DSCSA data straight are all difficult, unglamorous and worth paying for. This page is not an argument that you should stop. It is an argument about which half of the margin equation you have covered.
Procurement done at a level most pharmacies cannot reach alone.
Multi-wholesaler buying in one workflow
SureCost describes purchasing from every vendor "in one place, one PO, one workflow", with side-by-side pricing across wholesalers, secondary suppliers and manufacturer-direct options, and a single purchase order generated across vendors. Their integrations page names counterparties, including Cencora, Henry Schein, Morris and Dickson, Smith Drug Company, Value Drug Company and Dakota Drug, alongside a long list of secondary distributors. Naming your integrations publicly is a good sign about a vendor.
Contract compliance enforced at the moment of buying
They describe real-time contract alignment tracking against your actual vendor agreements, GPO contract pricing surfaced automatically, primary vendor and GPO alignment modeling, and buyer preference rules enforced at point of purchase. That last one is the difference between a compliance report and compliance. Slipping a generic compliance ratio during a shortage is a retroactive repricing of the entire period, and catching it at the point of purchase is the only place it is cheap.
DSCSA handled at a level of detail that suggests they mean it
EPCIS v1.2 data retrieval for compliant vendors, capture of GTIN-14, lot numbers, expiration dates and serial numbers, a rolling six-year retention of received EDI-856 and EPCIS ship events, quarantine and release handling for non-compliant items, and reconciliation of receiving data against vendor EPCIS transaction data. That is a specific and demanding implementation, not a checkbox.
Benchmarks in the buying screen, where they belong
SureCost surfaces WAC, AWP and NADAC benchmark pricing as context at the point of purchase. Putting the benchmark next to the decision, rather than in a report someone reads later, is the right design instinct, and it is the same instinct we apply on the reimbursement side.
Purchasing is exactly half the margin equation, and it is the half that cannot see your claims.
Margin is a subtraction. Cost is one side of it and reimbursement is the other, and a purchasing platform is structurally blind to the second one because claims never flow through it. So you can buy an NDC impeccably, at the best available price, in full contract compliance, and still lose money on every fill because the MAC on the plan you dispense it against sits below what you paid. That failure is invisible to a procurement tool by construction, and it is invisible to a reconciliation service too, because the claim paid exactly what it promised. It becomes visible only when the cost and the adjudication response are in the same system and get subtracted from each other, which is the specific thing we do about a minute after the claim comes back.
Both halves of the subtraction, and who holds which.
The figures in the SureCost column are figures SureCost publishes about itself on its own site. We have not audited them and we present them as their claims, not as findings.
| Capability | Attergo | SureCost |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-wholesaler purchasing and price comparison | No. We do not run your purchasing across vendors and we are not a procurement platform. | Yes, and it is the core competence. One PO across vendors, with named wholesaler and secondary distributor integrations. |
| GPO and primary vendor compliance | No equivalent. We are not party to your contracts. | Yes. Real-time contract alignment, GPO pricing surfaced automatically and buyer preference rules enforced at purchase. |
| DSCSA | Yes, at the level of answering a request from one query against the events we hold. | Yes, and in more depth on the receiving side: EPCIS v1.2 retrieval, serialization capture, six-year retention, quarantine and T2 reconciliation. |
| Reimbursement per fill | Yes. The adjudication response is the input, priced against your invoice cost within about a minute. | Not applicable. Claims do not flow through a purchasing platform. |
| Per-NDC profitability by payer | Yes, with payer, plan and BIN or PCN scorecards built from your own claims over time. | Not stated. Benchmarks are surfaced as purchasing context rather than as realized margin. |
| Clinical services billed on the medical benefit | Yes, encounter to 837P to 835. | Not applicable. |
| PBM audit evidence assembly | Yes. Purchase invoices matter in an audit, and they land bound to the claims they support. | Not stated as an audit response capability, though the six-year DSCSA retention is genuinely useful evidence. |
| Published pricing | Yes. Flat and per store. | Not published. Their pricing page returns a not-found error and no figures appear elsewhere on the site. |
| Published outcome figures | None. We publish no savings figure because we have no audited one to publish. | Yes. SureCost publishes over $400M in annual drug spend savings generated, 1,600+ pharmacies and 2 to 5% cost reductions. |
Every entry in the SureCost column is drawn from the pages listed at the foot of this page. Where their own materials do not state a capability, the cell says so rather than guessing, because an absence of marketing copy is not evidence of an absence of capability.
Two honest recommendations.
Choose SureCost if
your losses are on the buying side and you know it: you are running several wholesalers, your generic compliance ratio is a recurring problem, your GPO terms are not being applied consistently, or DSCSA receiving is a manual burden. Those are exactly the problems SureCost was built for, and no reimbursement analytics platform including this one will fix a purchasing process. If you have to pick one first, and the buying is genuinely undisciplined, pick the procurement platform.
Choose Attergo if
you buy reasonably well already and the money is still going somewhere. That is the common case, and it is the case a purchasing tool cannot diagnose, because a well-bought NDC that adjudicates below cost looks identical to a well-bought NDC that does not, right up until you subtract. The two systems also coexist without conflict: they are on your purchasing, we are on your claims, and the only thing we need from the buying side is the invoice.
The product that carries most of this weight on our side is Attergo Margin, and it is one of eight on a single connection.
Every claim above traces to their own words.
- SureCost homepage: one PO across vendors, and the published savings and pharmacy count figures
- SureCost Purchase Manager: side-by-side vendor pricing, contract alignment, GPO pricing and buyer preference rules
- SureCost DSCSA: EPCIS v1.2 retrieval, serialization capture, six-year retention and T2 reconciliation
- SureCost Smart Supply: real-time multi-location counts and usage-driven replenishment
- SureCost vendors and integrations: the named wholesalers and secondary distributors
- SureCost About Us: segments served and the published cost reduction range
What we could not verify
SureCost names no GPO and no pharmacy management system anywhere we could find, so we assert nothing about either. Their integrations page does not name McKesson or Cardinal Health, so we do not describe their wholesaler coverage as complete. Their savings and pharmacy count figures are unaudited self-reported marketing numbers and we attribute them accordingly. They publish no pricing: the pricing URL returns a not-found error.
See the other half of the subtraction.
Thirty minutes, one facility, a read-only connection and credentials you can revoke. We come back with what your own last month actually cost you.
Comparison based on publicly available information as of 2 August 2026. See something outdated? Tell us and we'll fix it. sales@attergo.com