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 favour. Before you sign it is a negotiation, and a vendor who will not answer plainly has told you something useful.
The mechanical exit is genuinely simple
The integration is read only, so 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. Revoke that credential and the feed stops for that location, leaving the others running. No chain wide switch to find, no support ticket required to make the stopping happen, no residue in PioneerRx to clean up.
Test that against the alternatives on your shortlist. 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, then deleted.
Different requirements. A contract that addresses only one is incomplete.
What you should be able to take
Four things, and they are not equally easy to get from a typical vendor.
The raw events. Everything the vendor received from your pharmacy system, as received. This is the substrate, and it is the item most vendors quietly omit, because exporting 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 unlabelled 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. 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
Every event is written immutably, in raw form, before anything parses it, and retained for ten years. That archive is what makes a complete export possible. 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
Ten years of retention exists because audit lookback windows are long. A PBM audit notice typically names a lookback period, commonly 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.
Ten years of retention and a request to delete on exit pull in opposite directions, and a vendor claiming both without qualification has not thought about it. Make it your choice, explicitly, in writing:
- Export and delete. You take the data, we remove it. You hold 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, since primary storage and backups are different things, how long it takes, and whether you get written confirmation.
What nobody can give you back
Event feeds are forward looking. The archive begins on the day you connect, not the day your pharmacy opened. Leave after eighteen months and you take eighteen months of events. Your next vendor’s archive starts on the day you connect them, whatever you hand over, unless they can ingest your export as history.
That switching cost is real, and it comes from the mechanism rather than from a contractual trick. Two things 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.
- The accumulating archive is an asset. It is a reason to start sooner, and a reason to demand the export terms up front, because what you are building is precisely what you would want to carry.
Your pharmacy system stays the system of record throughout. Attergo reads events and is never the only copy of anything clinical. Leaving puts no dispensing history at risk.
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 is quoted per store per month: $199 for Margin, $349 for Margin plus Audit, $649 for Platform, with the full table on pricing. Per store pricing keeps the arithmetic of leaving simple, because 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?
Ask the last one twice. Goodwill does not survive an acquisition, a change of leadership or a bad quarter. Contract terms do.
Ask us all six in the evaluation. Book a demo, or read how the archive and the export are built on developers.