The exit conversation belongs in the evaluation, not in the cancellation email. Once you want to leave, your leverage is gone and you are asking a favor. Before you sign it is a negotiation, and a vendor that will not answer plainly is telling you something useful.
This piece covers what leaving Attergo involves, what you should be able to take, where retention and deletion pull against each other, and which terms to get in writing from any vendor in this category, including us.
The mechanical exit is genuinely simple
Because the integration is read only, there is nothing to unwind inside your pharmacy system.
Attergo receives prescription events from PioneerRx. It has no write path back. It has never created a record, changed a price or queued a task in your system, so disconnecting does not require reversing anything.
Each store authenticates its event delivery with its own credential. Revoking that credential stops the feed for that location and leaves the others running. There is no chain wide switch to find, no support ticket required to make the stopping happen, and no residue in PioneerRx to clean up afterward.
That is a real advantage of the architecture, and worth testing against alternatives. A vendor that writes into your pharmacy system has a messier exit by construction, because someone has to decide what happens to everything it wrote.
Two different exits
Switching to another vendor. You want your data out in a form the next vendor can ingest, and the connection moved without a gap in coverage.
Stopping entirely. You want your data out for your own records, and then deleted.
These have different requirements, and a contract addressing only one is incomplete.
What you should be able to take
Four things matter, and they are not equally easy to get from a typical vendor.
The raw events. Everything Attergo received from your pharmacy system, as received. This is the substrate, and it is the item most vendors quietly omit, because exporting their processed output is easier than exporting the source.
The derived margin data. Per fill margin with the cost basis attached to each number, so a figure computed against your invoice cost is distinguishable from one computed against NADAC or a manual override. An export that flattens those into one unlabeled column has thrown away the part that makes the numbers defensible.
Your cost inputs. The cost files you provided and the overrides you set, with their dates. You supplied this, and it should never be hard to get back.
The access log. The append only record of who viewed protected health information. If you are ever asked to account for access during a period, that record needs to outlive the relationship.
Ask for a sample export during the evaluation, not a description of one. If that request causes difficulty in the sales cycle, it will not get easier later.
How Attergo answers it
The archive that makes a complete export possible runs underneath everything: every event is written immutably, in raw form, before anything parses it, and retained for ten years. The export covers the raw archive, the canonical events, your cost inputs with their dates, the per fill margin history with its cost basis labels, and the access log. Open formats, complete, contractual.
Ask every vendor for the sample export during evaluation, ours included. A vendor whose export exists only as a paragraph in a contract has told you how month fourteen will go.
The retention and deletion tension
Attergo retains raw events for ten years. That is deliberate, and it exists because audit lookback windows are long. A PBM audit notice typically names a lookback period, commonly in the range of one to two years, and some states cap how far back an audit may reach. Disputes and their aftermath run longer still. A two year data policy is comfortable right up until the moment it is not.
Now the tension. Ten years of retention and a request to delete on exit are in direct conflict, and a vendor claiming both without qualification has not thought about it. This should be your choice, made explicitly and written down:
- Export and delete. You take the data, we remove it. You have the record. If a lookback later reaches into that period, reconstructing it is your problem, and you accepted that consciously.
- Export and retain. You take a copy and the archive stays for the remainder of its retention, available if an audit arrives after you have left.
Neither is universally correct. What is wrong is discovering the vendor’s default a year after cancelling.
Get three specifics into the contract: what deletion covers (primary storage and backups are different things), how long it takes, and whether you get written confirmation.
What nobody can give you back
This applies to Attergo and to every event based vendor you will evaluate, and it argues both for and against us.
Event feeds are forward looking. Attergo’s archive begins on the day you connect, not the day your pharmacy opened. If you leave after eighteen months, you can take eighteen months of events. Your next vendor’s own archive starts on the day you connect them, no matter what you hand over, unless they can ingest your export as history.
So there is a real switching cost, and it is not a contractual trick. It is the nature of the mechanism. Two consequences follow:
- Ask a prospective vendor whether they can load an export from a prior system as history, and treat a vague answer as a no.
- Recognize that the accumulating archive is a reason to start sooner rather than to delay a decision, and also a reason to demand the export terms up front, since the asset you are building is precisely what you would want to carry.
Your pharmacy system remains the system of record throughout. Attergo is a reader of events, never the only copy of anything clinical. Leaving does not put your dispensing history at risk, which is a lower stakes exit than it first appears.
Terms to get in writing
Use these on any vendor in this category.
| Term | What to require |
|---|---|
| Export scope | Raw source data, not only processed reports |
| Export format | A documented, machine readable format you can name |
| Export timing | A stated number of days from request |
| Export cost | Ideally none, and never a fee that rises at cancellation |
| Deletion | On request, covering primary storage, with written confirmation |
| Retention default | What happens if you say nothing |
| Notice period | Stated in days, symmetrical if possible |
| Price protection | What can change at renewal, and with what notice |
| Post termination access | Read access for a wind down window, or explicitly none |
Attergo’s pricing is quoted per store per month: $199 for Margin, $349 for Margin plus Audit, $499 for the full platform. Per store pricing keeps the arithmetic of leaving simple, since the unit you cancel is the unit you bought. Whatever a vendor’s list price, get the term length, notice period and renewal mechanics into the document rather than into an email from a sales representative who may not be there next year.
The questions that separate answers from evasions
- Can I see a sample export file, from real structure, before I sign?
- Does the export include raw source data or only your processed output?
- If I cancel, how many days until I have it in hand, and at what cost?
- What is your retention default if I say nothing, and can I override it?
- Does deletion cover backups, and do I get written confirmation?
- Which of the answers you just gave are contractual, and which are goodwill?
That last one is worth asking twice. Goodwill does not survive an acquisition, a change of leadership or a bad quarter. Contract terms do.
The summary
Leaving Attergo is mechanically simple: revoke the per store credential and the feed stops, with nothing to unwind in your pharmacy system because nothing was ever written to it.
The immutable ten year archive means the data worth exporting exists in complete, raw form from your first connected day. Retention and deletion pull against each other, and the resolution belongs in your contract rather than in a support conversation after cancellation.
Ask these questions of every vendor you are considering. The answers say more about how a company behaves in year three than any part of the demo.