A pilot is there to break a claim, not to admire it. The claim here is that reading your prescription events in real time will show you money you are losing and cannot currently see, and that the numbers will be accurate enough to act on.
Four weeks tests that. Here is each one, and where they actually go wrong.
Week 0: paperwork and a credential
Three things happen before any data moves.
The BAA is signed. No PHI moves before it exists.
A per store credential is issued. In PioneerRx this is configured once per store, so events post to an endpoint over HTTPS. Nothing installs on a workstation. Nothing scrapes a screen. No dispensing workflow changes.
You name one person who owns the pilot. Skip this and the pilot goes nowhere. It does not have to be the owner. It has to be someone who will look at a screen twice a week and is allowed to say “that number is wrong”.
Where it breaks: the credential lands on the wrong store, or on one store when you assumed all of them. If you run multiple locations, decide in advance whether the pilot is one store or all of them. A single store is a cleaner test. A five store rollout answers a different question.
Week 1: events arrive and are archived
Success this week is unglamorous. Events show up, they are archived exactly as received, and you can see them in a feed with the store, the drug, the payer and the amount.
What is under test is the plumbing. Get that wrong and everything downstream is decoration.
Where it breaks:
Field names vary between store configurations. Pharmacy systems emit differently depending on version and setup. The adapter resolves each field from candidate names and records every field the mapping did not claim rather than discarding it, so variance found in week one is mapped against your real traffic, usually within a day. A payload change cannot silently drop your data.
Volume is not what anyone expected. Far lower usually means the credential is scoped more narrowly than you thought. Higher usually means event types you had not counted on.
Store codes are missing or inconsistent. This bites immediately once more than one location is connected.
Week 2: cost gets into the system
This week decides whether the pilot produces anything worth reading, because margin is only as good as the acquisition cost behind it.
Wholesaler invoice data is imported and matched to what you dispensed. Where an invoice exists for that NDC, margin is computed against it and labelled invoice based, high confidence. Where it does not, NADAC is the fallback and the fill is labelled indicative rather than presented as your cost. Where neither exists, no margin appears at all and the fill is flagged as needing a cost.
Where it breaks:
Coverage is lower than you expected. You will see fills with no margin. Uncomfortable in a demo, better said now.
NDC formats do not match. The same product is a 10 digit code in one system and 11 in another. Normalisation handles most of it. The residue is manual.
Package size versus dispensed quantity. Your invoice prices a bottle of 90 and the fill dispensed 30. Scaling is arithmetic, but it depends on the package quantity being right in the reference data, and sometimes it is not.
Invoices exist only as PDFs, or only inside a wholesaler portal the person running the pilot cannot open. Sort that access out in week 0.
340B or other contract pricing. If some of your volume runs on contract pricing, invoice cost is not the applicable cost. Exclude that population rather than let it distort the conclusions.
Week 3: numbers you can argue with
Now the useful work. Take ten fills and try to break them.
Pick a spread: a cheap generic, a brand, one with a large copay, a reversal, one with no invoice on file, and two you already suspect lose money. For each, write down independently what you believe the pharmacy received and what the drug cost. Then compare.
Every fill shows revenue, cost, the basis the cost came from, a confidence level and a note on any caveat. When your number and ours disagree, the cause is almost always a fee that was not known at adjudication, a cost basis that is NADAC rather than your invoice, or a package size mismatch.
Spend an hour on this with the person who owns the pilot. It is the highest value hour in the four weeks, and a vendor unwilling to sit through it is telling you something.
Where it breaks: the numbers disagree and nobody chases why. A disagreement traced to its cause is a pilot succeeding. A disagreement shrugged at is a pilot that gets quietly abandoned in week six.
Week 4: decide
Write the pass criteria in week 0. Write them in week 4 and the decision becomes a feeling. Reasonable criteria look like this:
- Events arrive reliably, and a deliberate outage is backfilled without duplicates.
- Cost coverage reaches a level you named in advance.
- Of the fills flagged as losing money, the ones you check are genuinely losing money.
- Something surfaced that you would not otherwise have seen, and someone could have acted on it.
- The person who owned the pilot wants to keep doing it.
That last one is not a soft criterion. A queue nobody works is worth nothing at any price.
What we will not do during a pilot
- Nothing is written back into your pharmacy management system. The integration is read only.
- No dispensing workflow changes. Nobody at the counter gets a new step.
- No hardware, no workstation software.
- No contact with your patients, ever.
- No change to how or when you order from your wholesaler.
What we need from you
- A named owner, and roughly two hours a week of their time.
- Access to wholesaler invoice data.
- One hour in week 3 for the disagreement session above.
- Permission to ask what a field means when your payload contains something we have not seen.
Test one claim, not eight
The platform runs eight products on a single event spine: Margin, Billing, Audit, Authorizations, Inventory, Compliance, Intelligence and Integrations. A four week pilot should still test one claim, and margin accuracy is the right one. Every other product inherits its credibility from the same data foundation. Prove that events arrive complete, that cost resolves correctly, and that the flagged fills genuinely lose money, and you have validated the spine the rest runs on.
Evaluations begin on PioneerRx, the reference integration. On another pharmacy system, the engagement opens with integration scoping and the pilot follows the adapter.
How to end it
If the answer is no, say so. You receive an export of your normalized events and we delete what we hold. There is no notice period on a pilot and no obligation at the end of it.
A four week evaluation that ends in a clear no is a good outcome. Written criteria, your numbers, a decision you can defend to yourself.
Start a pilot, or see what Attergo Margin does with the events once they land.