From Prescriptions to Patients: How AI Is Redefining the Medication Experience
Getting and paying for prescriptions is one of the most frequent—and fraught—experiences Americans have with the healthcare system. Nearly half of Americans with chronic conditions don’t take medications as prescribed, leading to over half a trillion dollars in avoidable costs and more than 100,000 preventable deaths each year.
Last year, Town Hall Ventures set out to find companies reimagining the role of pharmacy within the continuum of care. That exploration was shaped by shifting policy and market forces—including drug pricing reforms under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), rising specialty spending, new therapies, and advances in AI. After 7+ years of backing care models for underserved communities, we’ve seen that illness management doesn’t stop at the clinic; it continues at the pharmacy counter and in the home—where medications are started, stopped, or simply never taken. We believe those who bridge clinical and pharmacy workflows using technology, empathy, and data can drive better care. This year, we made two new investments reflecting that belief:
Pharmacy is a Core Pillar of Value-Based Care
For years, value-based care innovation focused on new models in primary care, virtual care, or home-based services. These models have assumed that providers could manage medications, but clinicians remain overwhelmed and under-supported. For too long, pharmacy has sat downstream of care delivery—treated as a fulfillment function rather than a clinical partner —undermining even the most sophisticated care delivery models.
We believe the next generation of companies will blur that line—embedding medication access and optimization into the heart of patient care — enabling tighter coordination, better adherence, and lower costs. Pharmacists—both human and AI-driven—become part of the care team, with technology integrating their workflows and giving providers the tools to guide patients from prescription to fulfillment to follow-up. When care delivery and pharmacy converge, incentives align, outcomes improve and costs decline. This convergence is fast becoming a core pillar of value-based care.
AI as a Bridge Between Care Delivery and Pharmacy
Town Hall Ventures’ pharmacy thesis starts from a simple truth: adherence is not a patient behavior issue—it’s a system design issue. The solution lies in integrating pharmacy into care delivery so that medication management is proactive, coordinated, and data-driven.
Sophisticated platforms—powered by AI—can ease the burden of rising polypharmacy, prescription access, and complex coverage rules by optimizing medication decisions and specialty dispensing at scale. AI can now flag drug interactions, suggest cost-effective alternatives, and automate time-consuming processes like prior authorizations. With new federal policies demanding price transparency and affordability, and with AI tools automating the most manual parts of pharmacy operations, the system is being rewired around what matters most: patients actually getting—and taking—the life-saving and health-preserving medications they need.
Two Town Hall Ventures portfolio companies—Arine and House Rx—are bringing this vision to life.
Arine: AI-Driven Medication Optimization
Arine is an AI-powered medication intelligence platform that helps payors and at-risk providers optimize drug regimens safely and cost-effectively. Arine identifies risks, flags adherence issues, and recommends prescriber-level interventions.
By influencing prescribing behavior in areas like complex chronic disease and behavioral health, Arine reduces avoidable complications. Co-founder and CEO Yoona Kim, PharmD, PhD, brings a pharmacist’s perspective to the product, building the platform in close collaboration with customers. Its modular platform supports outcomes-based contracts and Medicare Part D risk management & quality measures, making Arine a strategic partner for payors navigating Medicare and Medicaid pharmacy dynamics.
With Arine…
Providers act on 50% of AI-surfaced recommendations—a remarkably high adoption rate
Customers see reduced hospitalizations by up to 40% among patients with medication-related risks
Risk-bearing entities achieve a 10% reduction in total cost of care
Serving more than 30 million patients across dozens of risk-bearing entities, including many of the nation’s largest health plans, Arine is building the playbook for how to optimize medications in a value-based world. Arine demonstrates how AI can augment—not replace—clinical intelligence and turn medication management into a measurable performance lever.
House Rx: Pharmacy-In-A-Box
While Arine tackles medication optimization at the population level, House Rx is redesigning where and how specialty pharmacy care happens. Its technology embeds pharmacy services directly into provider practices, enabling clinics to operate their own in-house specialty pharmacies with world-class efficiency.
By integrating into practices’ EHR workflows and aligning prescriber-pharmacist coordination, House Rx brings medically integrated dispensing—historically reserved for large provider groups—within reach for independent clinics in an operationally seamless and financially viable way. At the heart of House Rx’s solution is a full-stack cloud platform that streamlines the entire specialty medication lifecycle powered by AI, not armies of staff—from prior authorizations and benefit verification to patient financial support, dispensing, and ongoing monitoring.
With House Rx…
Patients start medication therapy in an average of 3.5-days (80% faster than industry norms)
Providers complete prior authorizations in minutes instead of days, freeing 20 + hours per week for clinical staff. Also, these practices no longer rely on fragmented, payor- and PBM-owned pharmacies that can put profit before patients
Payors see mid-80% medication adherence rates, well above national benchmarks
Specialty drug spend now exceeds $300 billion annually, yet much of it fails to deliver value to patients. House Rx is changing this by proving that high-touch, tech-enabled models can dramatically improve both the economics and experience of specialty care.
Our Investing Approach: AI-Powered Pharmacy Services Unlock Value Across the Care Continuum
Whether through population-level analytics or clinic-level integration, this new class of AI-powered pharmacy services is making it easier for prescribers to get patients on the right medication at the right time by reducing friction, improving coordination, and aligning pharmacists, prescribers, and technology. The result? Faster time to therapy, reduced administrative burdens, and better patient outcomes.
Pharmacy-integrated services transform the pharmacy from a black box into a collaborative extension of the care team. Town Hall Ventures sees enormous potential in innovators bringing pharmacy out of its silo and into the center of patient care.
As we have shared before, AI has the potential to redefine healthcare operations—what we call “healthcare services as software.” That includes pharmacy, where analytics anticipate risk, no patient falls through the cracks, and access to life-saving therapy is frictionless. Achieving this “Scripts-to-Solutions” vision will require deep collaboration across providers, payors, pharmacists, technologists, and investors. This philosophy shapes our investment strategy: back innovations that transform areas of inefficiency—like fragmented, unmanaged pharmacy spend—into engines of value to redefine what’s possible for patients, providers, and the system at large.
At Town Hall Ventures, we’re proud to partner with companies, like House Rx and Arine, leading that transformation. Integrating pharmacy and leveraging AI isn’t a “nice-to-have”—it’s mission-critical for the future of healthcare.
