Rick Bates of RxSense Talks Collab With Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs, Direct-To-Consumer Business and More

In this month’s episode of Tuning In to the C-Suite, Managing Editor Peter Wehrwein talks with Rick Bates, MBA, president and CEO of RxSense.

Rick Bates, MBA

Bates, 53, founded the RxSense in 2015. The company, funded by private equity, says its revenues have grown fourfold since 2017 and that more than 100 clients use its enterprise platform. RxSense, headquartered in Boston, has 300 employees and is the parent company of SingleCare, a consumer drug pricing and coupon business that competes with GoodRx.

“I think our message is, in this day and age, people should be shopping for prescription drugs the same way they buy other consumer products,” said Bates about SingleCare.

In his conversation with Wehrwein, Bates described RxSense as a “technology platform company that has expertise in the direct-to-consumer business.” He emphasized that RxSense is not a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) — we don’t compete with our client, Bate said — but, rather, a company that supplies PBMs with technology, including some of the up-and-coming PBMs, such as EmsanaRx and Vivid Clear Rx.

“We’re the Intel inside. Both of those companies run on our platform,” said Bates. “I think they’re both going to be very, very successful in the markets they are pursuing.”

Bates and Wehrwein also discussed the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company(“we want them to be successful”) and RxSense launching a standalone business intelligence product called Rx IQ (“we’re in the process of building out capabilities so we can ingest a customer’s data”).

In October 2022, the company announced that it had received a “significant” investment form Parthenon Capital, a private equity firm, but amount and other terms were not disclosed.

Prior to RxSense, Bates was the president and chief operating officer of Catalyst Health Solutions (which later became Catamaran), for three years. Before Catalyst Health Solutions, he held senior positions at Coventry Healthcare, UnitedHealth Group, Cigna and Oxford Health Plans.

Listen in, learn a lot.