If “member engagement” still means mailers and a portal to you, then you’re already behind.
PBMs and health plans, along with brokers and consultants, have told us their member communications aren’t working. Lauren Sgambati, Levrx’s Director of Marketing and Client Success, shares “Over the years, I’ve heard the same lines time and again: We mailed the letter. We posted the notice in the portal. And members are still showing up at the pharmacy counter confused and surprised.”
And behind those familiar lines are real people: a parent who took unpaid time to pick up a prescription only to be hit with a surprisingly high bill; a patient whose specialty therapy is delayed by a missing step no one explained; a Human Resources employee swamped with calls after a formulary change; or even a support team buried in repetitive questions instead of resolving real issues, all for lack of the right information reaching members when it mattered.
The issue isn’t a lack of communication, but the failure to deliver it in a way that helps members understand and act. The traditional approach, driven by compliance requirements, falls short in a world that demands clarity, timeliness, and trust.
It’s time for the industry to move beyond the “post and pray” approach and start to deliver what members actually need: a digital, proactive, member-centric experience where no one gets left behind.
More Than Compliance
At its root, compliance provides the foundation of engagement by ensuring members receive required information as rules change. But we believe engagement must go further than the minimum. Leveling up means taking the next step and providing proactive updates that help the member take full advantage of their pharmacy benefit.
Lauren says it best: “It’s time to raise the bar and redefine what engagement should be: clear, proactive, and built around people, not just processes.” Everyone wins when engagement stops being a compliance exercise and becomes focused on member clarity.
Real-Time or Irrelevant
Expectations have shifted. In nearly every other industry, real-time engagement rules the experience. “From booking to boarding, you get real-time updates from the airline apps. The information comes to you, exactly when and where you need it. That’s the level of convenience members now expect, and pharmacy should be no different.” Lauren highlights as an example of real-time engagement in action.
These examples reflect a larger shift already in motion. Members expect the same real-time clarity in pharmacy that they receive from retail, travel, and banking experiences.
Whether that means a lower-cost medication, a nearby pharmacy option, or the coverage details needed to avoid surprises at the counter, members want to know how a change affects them BEFORE their next fill.
Roxanne AI™, our proprietary machine learning engine, is already making that possible. By analyzing plan-specific formularies, benefit designs, and pharmacy networks, it identifies the best available option for each member in real time. The result is smarter guidance that reduces friction, lowers costs, and drives better decisions.
This isn’t just a theory. When one client changed PBMs, thousands of members risked being left without their new ID cards in time. Instead of facing a pharmacy nightmare, our technology delivered digital ID cards within hours – keeping members covered and stress-free. No one makes pharmacy engagement this clear, this fast, and this effective.
One Place to Go
Members expect pharmacy benefits to be simple and connected, yet today they’re confronted with a maze of programs, logins, and links. What was meant to add support, if not done right, often creates complexity and leaves no clear path for them to act on their benefits.
The result is frustration that shows up in the data: nearly 4 in 10 health plan members report that their insurer makes it difficult to find the information they need1.
Levrx was designed with this standard in mind. Our platform consolidates all pharmacy programs from GLP-1 management to Pharmacogenomics, into a single streamlined experience. Clients gain full visibility into realized savings, along with white-label flexibility to integrate seamlessly into existing ecosystems.
This means no more hunting around, no late-night Google searches to see if a lower-cost option exists, no juggling multiple portals or websites, and no piecing together answers from scattered mailers. Instead, everything lives in one trusted, white-labeled platform that does the comparison work for them. We flip the experience – so pharmacy benefits finally work for members, not the other way around.
Easy to Use
Pharmacy spending continues to rise at an unsustainable pace. Between 2025 and 2026, Mercer projects prescription drug trends to increase 8 to 9% for traditional drugs and up to 10.5% for specialty therapies2. That growth continues to strain budgets and fuel demand for meaningful solutions.
The industry has introduced a range of savings programs to soften the blow, but the real test of success is whether members can actually understand and use them. As costs climb and choices multiply, the old model of mailed letters, static portals, and scattered point solutions isn’t an advantage anymore. It is holding the industry back.
The only engagement that will truly transform the member experience must be proactive, precise, and trusted. With Levrx, members are empowered, savings are realized, satisfaction grows, and the system works better for everyone. That is why, as Lauren puts it, “We aren’t following the trends in digital pharmacy engagement. We’re setting them.”
Sources:
- https://www.iqvia.com/insights/the-iqvia-institute/reports-and-publications/reports/the-use-of-medicines-in-the-us-2024
- https://www.mercer-government.mercer.com/our-insights/2025-Drug-Trend-and-Pipeline.html