Opinion: To Succeed, Direct-to-Patient Drug Sales Will Require Better Technology

The Trump administration’s recent executive order on lowering health care costs embraces direct-to-patient (DTP) drug pricing, accelerating a fundamental shift in how drug therapies reach patients.¹ Drug manufacturers are taking notice and launching DTP sales in growing numbers.² Yet, DTP programs are only as strong as the infrastructure they’re built on, and technology will increasingly determine success or failure.

A bolted-on or siloed DTP platform may promise to get programs off the ground quickly, but in reality it can derail launch timelines, waste investment dollars, and ultimately erode patient trust. To truly succeed, DTP platforms must be purpose-built for direct patient engagement, intelligently integrating the needs of patients, prescribers, payers, and pharmacists in a single, scalable system. That means seamlessly integrating patient, payer, and prescriber information, balancing automation with clinical oversight, and reducing friction for the patient.

For pharmacy professionals managing these programs, 3 technological priorities stand out: seamless integration, intelligent automation with clinical oversight, and transparency across all stakeholders. Each addresses a critical operational challenge facing pharmacies today.

Platforms that achieve this won’t just deliver speed and efficiency; they’ll create a competitive advantage. By aligning technology, data, and clinical collaboration, they will allow DTP programs to scale faster and offer a better patient experience, all while advancing the administration’s drug access goals.

Integration Is the Foundation

The future of DTP depends on how well technology connects and automates the entire patient journey. Each step, from benefit verification and prior authorization to fulfillment and adherence, creates opportunities for friction and failure. When these steps are scattered across multiple vendors or portals, patients can encounter delays, confusion, and lost prescriptions.

Importantly, integration is the foundation for automation, ensuring that all stakeholders operate from the same data stream, speeding routine aspects of the prescription journey, and seeking human oversight when clinical anomalies arise. This balance between automation and clinical judgment is what builds trust, protects patients, and ensures compliance in a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape.

The efficiencies from automation can be substantial. Real-time benefit verification, seamless digital patient experiences, and digital prior-authorization workflows reduce fill time while maintaining payer compliance. When prescribers can communicate seamlessly with pharmacies and payers through connected application programming interfaces, clinical accuracy improves and administrative overhead declines.

Integration also helps ensure access to more patients. Many patients who could benefit from DTP programs face affordability or geographic barriers that make retail access challenging. Platforms designed to handle both insured and cash-pay models, while automating cost visibility and coverage verification, can help expand access.

The challenge of building truly integrated DTP platforms is partly why many solutions remain fragmented. Most DTP technology vendors must coordinate with separate pharmacy partners, creating additional handoff points and data silos. Platforms operated by nationally licensed pharmacies can streamline this model by unifying the technology layer with pharmacy operations directly, eliminating one major integration gap. However, even pharmacy-based platforms must still solve the complex orchestration between payers, prescribers, and manufacturers to deliver on integration's full promise.

Designing for Transparency and Trust

Transparency is the currency of patient confidence. In a connected DTP ecosystem, every participant—patient, pharmacist, manufacturer, and payer—should share access to the same data flow. When patients can track prescriptions, understand benefit determinations, and receive timely communication, trust in the system grows.

This transparency also fuels safety and efficiency. Shared data allows pharmacists to flag discrepancies before fulfillment, manufacturers to monitor adherence trends, and payers to manage utilization without disrupting access. Modern analytics can turn this information into real-time insights that support proactive interventions rather than reactive fixes.

Trust also depends on communication. Patients need consistent updates about status, delivery, and refills; prescribers require visibility into treatment progression; and pharmacists must have clear escalation pathways for clinical review. The most effective DTP systems can automate these exchanges, integrating notifications, documentation, and verification into a single, continuous loop of engagement.

The Scalable Digital Pharmacy Checklist

When evaluating a DTP platform, organizations should look for solutions that do more than just digitize transactions, unifying all parts of the health care landscape so consumers, manufacturers, and payers can access everything through a single ecosystem. Here’s what to prioritize:

1. Unified data integration: Look for real-time payer eligibility, benefit verification, and secure electronic health record connectivity through connected APIs, all accessible from a single interface rather than multiple portals.
2. Intelligent automation with clinical oversight: Health systems need automated fulfillment workflows for routine prescriptions that trigger pharmacist review for clinical exceptions, drug interactions, or unusual dosing patterns, maintaining medication safety standards throughout.
3. Transparency and communication: Systems should have multichannel patient engagement (reminders, support, and order tracking) paired with real-time reporting and adherence analytics that give all stakeholders—pharmacists, prescribers, and payers—visibility into the prescription journey.
4. Security and scalability: Look for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliance, comprehensive audit trails, state licensure safeguards, and modular architecture that enables expansion across multiple therapies and payer models without requiring platform rebuilds.

The DTP Competitive Advantage

The Trump administration’s embrace of DTP drug distribution models is supercharging a trend that was already gaining momentum, but the success of these programs will hinge on the strength of the platforms powering them. The most effective DTP models will be underpinned by an integrated, data-driven, and intelligently automated platform, unifying patients, prescribers, payers, and pharmacists in one connected ecosystem.

By aligning technology, data, and clinical collaboration, these platforms will offer a lasting competitive advantage: faster scaling programs, enhanced patient experience, and powerful efficiencies, all while helping advance the administration’s broader goals of improving affordability in care.

REFERENCES

1. Delivering Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing to American Patients. Executive Order. White House. May 12, 2025. Accessed December 10, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/delivering-most-favored-nation-prescription-drug-pricing-to-american-patients/

2. Constantino AK, Coombs B. Health returns: Amgen joins a growing list of drugmakers selling directly to consumers. CNBC. October 7, 2025. Accessed December 10, 2025.