Expires 04/01/2021

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Alto Pharmacy Technician

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For Black History Month, we’re recognizing pivotal Black leaders in healthcare who’ve paved the way forward for our country and the Black community.

Services that reduce travel and encourage social distancing are now more essential than ever, not only for vulnerable populations but all of us as members of our communities. Alto’s free same-day doorstep delivery ensures you have safe and reliable access to medications in this time of uncertainty. 

Hear first-hand from members of the Alto technology teams.

Alto / Blog

A personal health journey with hyperthyroidism, Graves’ Disease, and Horner's Syndrome led Alto's Head of Talent to improve the patient pharmacy experience.

Alto's Head of Talent Shares His Personal Health Journey

As a patient, I dreaded my pharmacy experience. So I joined Alto to change it. 

My first sign of hyperthyroidism showed up when I was 20 and my struggle with pharmacies started soon after. It would be more than a decade before I found a way to be a part of solving this industry’s problems.

When I first heard about the opportunity at Alto in 2019, I actually laughed. Why would I want to work at a pharmacy? I hated pharmacies. But the recruiter I was working with convinced me to reconsider and after speaking to Jamie, one of the founders, I understood. Alto was unlike any other pharmacy out there. In fact, they weren’t just a pharmacy. They were on a mission to improve patients’ quality of life. I jumped at the chance to fix a broken industry that is hungry for innovation.

I had just come back from a trip to New York and went for a routine run around the neighborhood. I was so drained after running one mile that I had to stop and sit down. This didn’t make sense; at 20, I was in the best shape of my life. As the next few weeks went on, the symptoms worsened: severe chest pain, shortness of breath, and anxiety attacks. Being the stubborn athlete I am, I pushed through it, until one day, I blacked out during a run and woke up lying face down in the dirt. Around that same time, I developed a lazy eye and finally decided to go to the doctor.

After that delayed visit I was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, Graves’ Disease, and Horner's Syndrome. My standing heart rate was 105, or about 50 BPM more than it should have been! I'm so thankful for my family members and the doctors who acted quickly to get me medical care. While my treatment plan was straight-forward, my experience as a patient on prescription medications became a nightmare. I quickly learned how inconvenient, impersonal, and non-patient-centric the pharmaceutical industry was.

I tried pharmacy after pharmacy, and the issues and frustrations remained the same. My script would be sent to the wrong address, or I’d receive the wrong dosage and brand of medication, even though my medication never changed! It became so routine that once a month, I’d block off two hours to talk through my refill requests with the pharmacy. But like clockwork, the same problems would reoccur—year after year after year. Having told my story to tons of other patients and caretakers, I know I’m not alone in this experience.

Like any disappointed customer in the 2000s, I took to the internet to learn more. What I found was alarming. The NPS scores for the leading pharmacies are abysmal. CVS Pharmacy, one of the largest retail pharmacies, has an NPS score of -10. Yes, negative ten. It's also estimated that up to 50% of medications are not taken as prescribed, creating up to $300 billion in avoidable drug costs annually. Even worse, it's estimated that more than 125,000 preventable deaths each year can be attributed to medication non-adherence. That's three times more than deaths from car accidents nationally!

While there was comfort in knowing others felt my pain and were experiencing the same frustrations, I was angry that there wasn't anything being done about it. I was frustrated, both as a patient and as a civilian, and didn’t know how to try to solve the problem. 

Meanwhile, after graduating college, I began my career in Michigan, where I’m from. Working for a recruiting agency, Aerotek, I was hiring for all sorts of roles—from machine operators to janitors—but I always had an interest in tech.  I found out about Barracuda Networks, a security tech company with an office in Ann Arbor. I originally joined to build their data protection division from 20 to 250. Their office was about 20 people and it needed to grow to 250. I had a ton to learn—when I started, I didn’t even know what a software engineer was! My role evolved quickly, eventually broadening to manage all tech recruiting across the U.S. and later, to building their first international recruiting team.

After almost five years, I started to look at other companies. Quora had been a long-time favorite product of mine. I loved that they connected knowledge with people all over the world. The perspectives I found were genuine, diverse, and fascinating. On Quora, there are professors, industry experts, and people who just got out of prison, sharing their knowledge and experience. I joined Quora to grow their team and jumped into the consumer internet space for the first time. Working there, I learned how to refine and scale processes to enable hiring for balanced and diverse teams. At a certain point though, I was ready for a new challenge, to move outside of an advertising-based business model, and to be in a steep learning curve again.

I had no idea where I wanted to go next. Looking around the Bay Area, I felt that with so many smart, capable people in tech, we could be doing more. I didn’t agree with a lot of what I was seeing, especially in terms of the kinds of problems that were getting the most investment, time, and resources. I’d spent almost 10 years building my career and didn’t even know if I wanted to stay in tech. I’d lost touch with a sense of purpose and meaningful legacy. 

I knew I wanted to have a lot of personal impact, and a mission I completely aligned with. I wanted a company where employees care about the lives they’re touching, the people they’re working with, and the communities they are impacting. And I wanted to work with a small team and grow it. I didn’t know if I could find all of that within Silicon Valley.

Then I got introduced to Alto. I toured the pharmacy, met with the leadership team, and learned about their ambitious plans for growth, and how I could be part of making those happen successfully. The things I noticed during my interview process with Alto are still very real today as an employee, especially the level of empathy people bring to work. Alto was the first place I interviewed where people were truly getting to know me, and understanding the motivation behind my past professional decisions.

I joined Alto in August of 2019 as their Head of Talent. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to work for a company whose culture, people, and mission are centered on supporting others and making a change in an industry that hasn't seen any significant transformation in the last 50 years. We’re seeking to understand but also wanting to be principled in our approach, and not compromise on patient health outcomes. 

Over the last year, the recruiting team has grown from 4 to 30, and our primary focus has been embedding solutions focused on building a diverse workforce. From implementing our first early talent apprenticeships, to building an inclusive hiring process by creating a training culture, we've grown the company from 180 to 750 across 4 states and 7 office locations.

This industry serves a diverse population and I’m learning a ton along the way. Working at Alto allows me to be a part of creating a healthcare solution that will truly be patient-centric. I want to continue to surround myself with people who have the same passion and bring their unique experiences, thoughts, and ideas to help us build tomorrow's pharmacy and fulfill medicine's true purpose: to improve quality of life—for everyone who needs it.

If you have any questions about Alto, or are interested in joining our team, please reach out via LinkedIn.

Alto’s Head of Talent Shares His Personal Health Journey

Utsav Ahuja, software engineer at Alto, shares why he joined the team after a thorough job search that included offers from companies including Google, Dropbox, Amazon, and more.

A software engineer's journey to Alto

After a thorough job search, I recently started working at Alto Pharmacy. In this post, I share why Alto is a special opportunity that I feel privileged to be a part of.‌

Alto is, at its core, a pharmacy. A pharmacy is traditionally defined as: "a store where medicines are prepared and sold." Indeed, Alto satisfies that definition, but it goes further than that. The most obvious way is through same day, courier delivery, but that's just one piece. For example, Alto also handles the complex coordination required between a patient, their healthcare provider, and their insurance.

There were many facets that attracted me to the opportunity in the retail pharmacy industry:

Market size: In 2018, drug spend in the U.S. topped $420 billion, and its only increasing. In 2015, just 3 years prior, it was $364 billion.[1]

Ripe for disruption: Of the top 25 retail pharmacies in the U.S., not a single one was founded after 1976.[2] The 5 largest pharmacies in the U.S. are, on average, 86 years old.

The status quo: The NPS for one of the largest retail pharmacies in the U.S., CVS Pharmacy, is an astoundingly low -5.[3] That's right, negative. For comparison, that's worse than Comcast (-3). Worse still, a recent New York Times article highlighted severe issues at chain pharmacies, caused by chronic understaffing and corporate profit-seeking. One pharmacist reported to a regulator, "I am a danger to the public working for CVS." [4]

Lives at stake: It's estimated that up to 50% of medications are not adhered to, creating up to $300 billion in avoidable drug costs annually.[5] Even worse, it's estimated that more than 125,000 avoidable deaths each year can be attributed to medication non-adherence, more than 3x than from car accidents.[6] Alto's patients' adherence rate is 77%, 30% higher than the industry average.

Delivery: By delivering medication, one Alto Pharmacy can service the equivalent of 400 chain pharmacies. This leads to substantial savings in retail expenses and better utilization of pharmacists and technicians.[7]

Centralized, specialized care: By centralizing pharmacists and the care team, each member can be more specialized in particular therapeutic areas--such as fertility or psychiatry--than the traditional retail pharmacist.

Customer happiness: Alto's NPS is astonishingly high, not just for a pharmacy, but for any customer facing business: over 80.[8] Indeed, Alto's reviews on Yelp are overwhelmingly positive.

Provider Experience: AltoMD, Alto's platform for healthcare providers, saves doctors and other providers on the platform tens of hours of paperwork, coordination, and other administrative tasks each week. The platform also gives visibility into the fill status of patients' medications, something that most providers do not have today.

Extra Mile: Alto coordinates proactively with healthcare providers and insurance to resolve issues, such as submitting prior authorizations and handling billing issues.

Patient first: Alto always puts the patient first. For example, Alto is always looking for the best price for the patient, whether it be through the patient's insurance, using a coupon, or rebates. Even if it reduces--or eliminates--Alto's profit. These cost savings aren't small; by last count, Alto has saved its patients $23 million.

Alignment on mission: Alto is a mission-driven company, and while many companies have missions on the wall, it's rare to see strong alignment on a mission. In every encounter with I had with Altoids, their earnest belief in the company and passion for the work it was doing was unmistakable.

Leadership: Alto's CEO, Matt, and CTO, Jamie, are modest, determined, and passionate. Their humble approach to building a company is a rare breed. For example, consider how Alto started: by buying AG Pharmacy, an independent pharmacy in the Mission District of San Francisco. The reasoning was simple--they needed to truly learn the needs and services a pharmacy fulfilled before they could hope to improve it. Just listen to Matt talk about Alto on recent podcast, and I think you'll understand why I admire, and believe, in them.

Engineering growth. Alto plans on quadrupling its engineering count in 2020. It was exciting for me to be a part of that because I knew that would be a critical period in the company. Furthermore, they had accomplished so much already with fewer than 25 engineers. This was impressive because Alto has to work with 4 distinct parties--insurance companies, healthcare providers, its own operations team, and consumers--and build software that brings them all together.

Ambitious expansion plans: Alto aims to serve 100 million people by 2025. This expansion will allow Alto to redefine the role a pharmacy plays in people's lives.

I'm inspired by Alto's commitment to always put patients first. I'm inspired by the ambition to fix a massive, fundamentally broken industry, piece by piece. But most of all, I'm inspired by the notion that a company can both be a good business and a force for good. We need more of those in our world.

If this inspires you too, I invite you to apply and join us. Even if you're skeptical, I still invite you to apply. I think you'll find an ambitious group of people in service of one mission: to fulfill medicine’s true purpose — to improve the quality of life — for everyone who needs it.

If you have any questions about Alto, or ideas to make it better, please do let me know. I'd love to talk to you.

1. https://drugchannelsinstitute.com/files/2019-PharmacyPBM-DCI-Overview.pdf 

2. Not including mergers and acquisitions. https://www.skainfo.com/reports/most-powerful-pharmacies 

3. https://customer.guru/net-promoter-score/cvs-health 

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/health/pharmacists-medication-errors.html 

5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3934668/ 

6. https://www.pillsy.com/articles/medication-adherence-stats 

7. https://blog.alto.com/how-alto-pharmacy-is-using-tech-to-put-patients-first-3be4d1c61013 

8. https://blog.alto.com/https-blog-alto-com-reinventing-the-community-pharmacy-be9d80d48722f 

Why a Software Engineer Turned Down 8 Other Offers to Join the Alto Team

Utsav Ahuja shares why he joined Alto despite offers from companies including Google, Dropbox, Amazon, and more.

Why a Software Engineer Turned Down 8 Offers to Join the Alto Team

Alto’s expansion brings free daily doorstep delivery of medications to Denver-Boulder metro area residents

Starting Wednesday, April 15, residents of the Denver-Boulder metro area can now choose Alto’s same-day doorstep delivery for their pharmacy needs. 

At Alto, we believe it’s our job to ensure you have your medications at the best price, on time and with the support you need. We bring pharmacy to you - no more waiting in line, making an extra trip, or finding out your prescription isn’t ready to be picked up after you’ve already arrived. Our free doorstep delivery means your medications come directly to you on the day and time you select, and most medications are available the same-day. Stay up to date on your courier’s progress with text alerts or in our mobile app. 

Starting a new medication or doing an injection for the first time? Message a pharmacist with your questions, even in the evenings and on weekends. And we’re a full service pharmacy - we stock all major brand, generic, over-the-counter and specialty medications, meaning your entire family’s pharmacy needs can be managed in the Alto app and coordinated into one delivery.

Monday - Friday: 6:30 – 9:30 pm MT in Denver, 7 - 10 pm MT for Boulder and outlying areas
Saturday: 2 – 5 pm MT in Denver, 2:30 - 5:30 pm MT for Boulder and outlying areas

Monday - Friday: 12 – 6 pm MT
Saturday: 9:30 am – 6 pm MT (closed on Sundays)
Please note that we are currently offering curbside pick-up only for walk-in business.

Denver and Boulder area residents interested in using Alto’s services for their medication needs can ask their doctor’s office to send all prescriptions to Alto Pharmacy (via ePrescribe, phone or fax). Have existing prescriptions at another pharmacy? Start a transfer online or give us a call at 1 (800) 874-5881, and we’ll handle the switch.

Alto is proud to call Denver our second home. Our HQ2, located in Denver’s Golden Triangle neighborhood, employs more than 225 area residents in pharmacy, operations, finance, engineering, and customer support. We’re committed to bringing exceptional care to our families, neighbors, friends and fellow healthcare professionals. 

“As a member of the Denver community, I’m excited to bring the Alto pharmacy experience to my neighbors and family,” says Andrew Storjohann, Pharmacist in Charge of Alto’s Denver location. “As a pharmacist and healthcare professional, I’m particularly glad more residents will now have access to our contact-free delivery model - it’s the safest choice for medication needs during our current shelter-in-place period for COVID-19.”

Once things get back to normal and we’re all moving out and about, come say hello! Stop by during our in-person pickup hours to meet Andrew and the team. We're located at 929 Broadway in downtown Denver.

General customer support hours are Monday - Friday 10 am - 10 pm MT and Saturday - Sunday 11 am - 7 pm MT. Patients can reach out to Alto via phone/text at 1 (800) 874-5881, email or app.

Founded in 2015, Alto is a patient-centric digital pharmacy based committed to the health and wellbeing of you and your family. We provide free same-day delivery to your door seven days a week for prescriptions, but, more importantly, offer cost transparency, personalized in-app and phone support, and real-time coordination with doctors and insurance companies to get you the care that you need. Alto is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Denver and currently delivers across the greater Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County, Seattle, Denver and Las Vegas.

The Founding Story of Alto

Mattieu Gamache-Asselin, CEO & Co-founder

On August 1st, 2015, I was so excited to move into my shiny, new office: a storage closet. I looked across to my co-founder, Jamie, and wondered how two engineers from Facebook ended up in the back of a small, family-run pharmacy in the Mission.

Earlier that summer, Jamie and I had left our jobs to start a company that could create lasting change in the world and have massive impact on people’s lives. We were drawn to healthcare and shocked to learn that in the U.S., 50% of people don’t get or take their medications as prescribed. This problem, referred to as medication non-adherence, is one of the country’s leading causes of hospitalization and deaths, and is often due to the high costs and friction in the pharmacy experience. We’d both been at big, retail pharmacies and saw how broken the system was — deeply inefficient and in many ways, inhumane. So, we decided to start by tackling pharmacy.

We ran some Facebook ads, offering a pretty simple service that would pick up your prescriptions and deliver them to your doorstep. That first week, we succeeded in delivering medications to our first happy, paying customers. We thought speed was the key benefit, so we named the company “ScriptDash.” Little did we know, we would need to build so much more (including a new company name, Alto — a nod to a higher, elevated experience).

We heard about a small, beloved community pharmacy, called AG. Located at Army & Guerrero in the Mission district, AG had been owned by pharmacist Vivian Cheung for over 30 years. We befriended Vivian, and she let us follow her around and learn. As weeks went by, we became more curious and amazed by all the backend steps required to make things work — not only behind the counter at the pharmacy, but also between the doctor, the insurance companies and the patient. Vivian was very kind and patiently explained every step to her two newest ‘interns.’

One day, we were watching Vivian prepare a prescription for a patient, Walter, when she noticed that the copay increased from last month’s copay by a few dollars. Vivian knew that for Walter, a few dollars would matter to him. We watched Vivian pick up the phone to call Walter and explain the copay change. Walter was thankful for Vivian’s call and ultimately came in to pick up his meds that evening. It was that day when I realized that what patients need is for their pharmacist to really know them — the way Vivian knew Walter’s health conditions, medication history and his preferences — so that pharmacists can help patients navigate the complexities of healthcare and get the medication they need. I was excited to think about how technology, alongside a caring, patient-focused pharmacy team, could help us bring this type of experience to millions of patients who desperately need an expert pharmacist like Vivian in their corner. It quickly became clear to us that what patients needed was way more than just delivery, that in order to do this right, we needed to be a fully-fledged pharmacy.

Looking back, one of the most important moments in Alto’s history was raising enough capital to purchase AG pharmacy, allowing us to continue partnering with Vivian and her team. We were fully aligned on our mission, and couldn’t have imagined doing this with anyone else.

Being fully immersed in the pharmacy and working alongside pharmacists every day allowed us to more deeply understand the issues with the existing pharmacy experience and why so many patients don’t get or take their medications as needed. We quickly built out our team, bringing together even more expertise across both technology and healthcare, grounded by the core values and caring ways we learned from AG. That first year, we also built the core pieces of our technology stack — our pharmacy operating system, our physician collaboration tool and an app for Alto patients.

Fast-forward to today. We’ve far outgrown that storage closet. We now serve tens of thousands of patients across multiple cities and multiple specialties, all made possible by our incredible team of nearly 300 and the technology platform we’ve built. We’re able to better educate patients about their medication and pricing, deliver medication to their doorstep and provide expert pharmacist advice on an ongoing basis. We are thrilled when customers tell us that they are happy (our NPS satisfaction rate is 80+, compared to pharmacy chains with 5 points) and healthier (we’ve seen our patient’s medication adherence rise to 70% from the industry norm of 50%). That first year with AG really shaped our vision for what a great pharmacy could be and the type of multidisciplinary team we’d need to build it. It’s amazing to think about how far we’ve come, but in many ways, it still feels like the early days. There’s so much more we need to do to bring this type of caring, community pharmacy experience to all the patients who need and deserve it. We are still just getting started!

Our mission is to fulfill medicine’s true purpose — to improve quality of life — for everyone who needs it. That takes a dedicated team of mission-driven, value-minded people. Read on to figure out if Alto is the right career move for you.

Help Us Shape the Future of Healthcare

Working at Alto isn’t just a job. For every team member, from product designers to pharmacists to patient care gurus, Alto is a means to a fulfilling career focused on making a difference in the lives of people who rely on prescription medicine to lead healthy, happy lives. In the process, we’re also changing an industry that has long gone unchecked.

At the highest level, Alto is a pharmacy. But we are not a traditional pharmacy. Instead of operating dozens of small-volume distribution sites across a metro area like chain pharmacies, we own and operate high-volume pharmacy fulfillment centers staffed by small, highly efficient teams supported by proprietary technology. We have one fulfillment center per metro area that we serve, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Orange County, and a centralized operations facility in Denver. Out of our fulfillment centers, we process and fill prescription orders and deliver directly to patients’ homes or offices by way of our free, same-day courier service.

On top of the convenience and accessibility of same-day delivery, Alto has three product pillars that allow us to deliver an exceptional experience to our users: the Alto Patient app, Alto MD, and Wunderbar. Learn more about our products and our industry-disrupting business model.

Alto is the world’s most patient-centric pharmacy. Our goal is not simply to distribute prescription medications but to improve patients’ health outcomes and their quality of life and to make those improvements accessible to everybody.

To get to that point, we need to understand what’s preventing patients from accessing all the benefits medicine has to offer. We believe it’s especially important to address the high-level problem of non-adherence, which is when patients don’t take the medication they’re prescribed. It also means learning how to scale our technology and processes to bring our products to more people in current and new markets. To achieve both of these things, we need to first scale our team. Learn more about Alto’s potential for growth and plans for the future, and how our team contributes to our success.

Loving what you do starts with doing something you believe in. It’s enriched by working alongside people who share your goals in an environment conducive to your work style and aspirations. At the foundation of Alto’s culture is our mission; our core values like acting empathically, thinking rigorously, making impact, staying humble, and putting patients first; the diverse backgrounds of our team members; and the supportive but highly autonomous way we get work done. Learn more about the Alto’s values and culture through the eyes of our CTO and co-founder, Jamie Karraker.

If Alto sounds like an environment you would thrive in, we would love to hear from you! We’re always on the lookout for great people to fill in our product, design, engineering, analytics, people, recruiting, finance, sales, business operations, logistics, pharmacy, and patient care teams. Check out our open positions to see if there is an opportunity that’s right for you!

Are You Right for Alto?

Why Mission-Driven Software Engineers Hold the Key to Alto’s Continued Success

Alto is the world’s most people-centric pharmacy. Our goal is not simply to distribute medications but to improve health outcomes and quality of life. What’s more, we want to make those improvements accessible to everybody.

To get to that point, we need to understand what is preventing people from accessing all the benefits medicine has to offer. We believe it’s especially important to address non-adherence, which is when people don’t take medications as prescribed. Non-adherence is a national problem that causes 125,000 avoidable deaths per year (more than three times the number of car accident deaths) and $300 billion in avoidable medical costs (more than half the money spent on pharmacy as a whole).

It also means learning how to scale our technology and processes to bring our products to a bigger swath of the population. To achieve both of these things, we need to first scale our engineering team.

Because of our unique business model, Alto is positioned to pursue three exciting growth vectors:

New Therapeutic Specialties: In addition to our general pharmacy capabilities, we have developed specialized expertise and infrastructure for managing complex treatments like fertility, dermatology, HIV, psychiatry, and other therapies that come with sticky coordination issues and unique considerations. We have made it easier than ever for people to navigate these treatment areas, but there is more we can do. Our team has identified 26 additional treatment areas that could benefit from specialized technology and processes. Mastering those areas is high on our to-do list.

New Geographic Markets: By expanding into the top 50 U.S. cities, we could potentially serve 55% of the country’s population. If we expand to the top 100 cities, our coverage would increase to 70%.

New Clinical Partnerships: Alto facilitates coordination between our team, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and the people taking the medications. In the process, we improve workflows and health outcomes. That offers a powerful benefit to clinics, medical groups, and hospital systems. Because of that reputation, we currently have a waiting list of healthcare providers who want to partner with us. That’s more demand than we can keep up with, which isn’t such a terrible problem.

When Opportunity and Demand Exceed Capacity

Alto is in a fortunate position. It is rare among companies to have multiple compounding growth vectors and a reserve of would-be partners angling for our product. We are not demand constrained, we are operationally constrained, and even then, we continue to double our business every six to nine months — just not as quickly as our potential promises.

Scaling up as a means of reaching our potential is an exciting challenge we’re already tackling. In late 2018, we closed our Series C, giving us the fuel we need to build out our engineering team and develop the technology and processes that will make our continued growth possible. That work will entail fleshing out each of our existing product areas, scaling them, and identifying and solving even more deep-rooted industry issues through better technology and better processes.

Currently, Alto boasts a small but talented and agile engineering team staffed by individuals who honed their experience at some of the biggest names in tech like Facebook, Google, Uber, 23andMe, MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley. All of our engineers are relatively senior, so everyone has autonomy and ownership over their projects. It’s a collaborative, supportive, mission-driven environment, which is how we’ve been able to build so much in a relatively short period of time.

Up until now, we have been deliberate about keeping the team small, but we’ve reached an inflection point. In the next 18 months, we’re looking to increase the engineering team four-fold. With our new team in place, we will be in a great position to focus on our objectives: building and perfecting our operational efficiencies and product scalability.

We’re approaching the challenge of scalability from a few angles:

One is automation. We want to take the algorithms that are in our employees’ heads and put them into code, so they can focus more on caring for patients rather than logistics. We’ve done a bunch of automation work already, but there’s a lot left to do.

We’re also intent on designing tools to help our own team be more efficient with their time, which will mean better UX, better UI, more batching, and less context switching.

The third angle is self-service, and it’s the one we’re focused most intently on. Right now, there is significant human interaction between our team and consumers because we want to make sure consumers have the information they need to make optimal healthcare decisions. In our next phase of growth, we want to automate that process without losing any transparency or depriving a consumer of any agency, no matter their technological competence.

Essentially, we want to build the pharmacy version of TurboTax (without the part about lobbying to keep the system broken). With the right prompts and information, TurboTax walks users through the U.S. tax system, which is huge and complicated. In effect, the user becomes totally self-servicing. We want to do the same for the people who use Alto. That said, not everybody is proficient or comfortable with technology. In the spirit of accessibility and inclusivity, it will still be important that everyone who uses Alto also has the option to speak to a real, knowledgeable, and friendly person to get their questions answered and needs met. We have a responsibility as a healthcare provider to take care of all our patients, no matter how tech-savvy they might be, but for these patients we can still use technology to enable our team to get the patient the best possible option, quickly and easily.

Our engineering team is working toward products with even more expertise built in. In the process, we will also make our operations more efficient and more scalable, unblocking barriers to expansion in existing markets, new markets, and new verticals.

When we succeed at that alignment, we stand to change the nature of the industry. To get there, we will continue to grow our engineering team with right-fit, world-class talent that not only has the skillset to take Alto to the next level but also the values to keep us aligned and mission-driven in the process.

Learn more about Alto’s company values and mission-driven work culture.

To Alto’s CTO, an ethical, altruistic, supportive workplace is everything.

Every morning (ok, most mornings), I wake up motivated — eager, even — to get out of bed and go to work. But it’s not because I am some super-performing success-bot. This is not another blog post about a c-level executive’s otherworldly, highly-meticulous-yet-seemingly-effortless morning routine, and I have no prescriptive regimen for staying happy and mindful while still managing to “get it all done.” I only have one piece of advice, but it is one that has served me (and my mornings) well:

Work with people who share your passion and values.

At Alto, the company I co-founded in 2015, everyone, from me (the CTO) to product engineers to part-time prescription couriers, is dedicated to the same mission and vision. Every day, we strive to improve health outcomes by optimizing technology and processes to become the world’s most people-centric pharmacy. I am never not excited to work alongside the few hundred Alto employees that daily act in concert to support the success of our company and make a difference in the lives of people who use Alto.

Underlying this relentless drive toward mission and vision is a set of shared core values that defines our internal culture:

Patients come first — even before our bottom line and industry partners. We will always prioritize the wellbeing of the people who use Alto to manage their prescription medications.

Leave no person behind. It’s more important to be good for all than to be great for a select few.

Start with empathy. We strive deeply to understand the thoughts and feelings of everyone we interact with.

Focus on impact. We prioritize impact over activity and focus on the work that makes the biggest strides toward our goals.

Think rigorously. We’re open to changing our minds and never hesitate to question assumptions and first principles. There is nothing sacred about the status quo.

Be humble. Our work — however expert, technical, or specialized — is in service of our team, the people who use Alto, and the greater good. Everyone’s contributions count, and no one is too important to take out the trash, so to speak. And we are certainly not above other players in the industry whose mission to help patients aligns with our own.

For me and my teammates, it’s extremely fulfilling to contribute to this smart, caring, talented team working tirelessly to help so many people. Everyone’s role is different but invaluable, and our efforts have real meaning. I can say with confidence that working in this environment makes a huge difference in how I carry myself, because I know from previous professional experiences what the opposite looks and feels like.

When my co-founder Matt and I started Alto in 2015, we were both software engineers at Parse, a Facebook-owned company. Having spent years in Silicon Valley, we were already jaded by the tech ecosystem and were ready for a change. In thinking about what we wanted to pursue next in our lives, we noticed that other companies were not working on society’s most meaningful problems; they were focused on catering to the 1%. In contrast, we wanted to use our time and skills to build something that makes a tangible, positive impact on the daily lives of all people, especially those ignored by the tech industry.

And so, we found ourselves drawn to healthcare — a big, broken industry that affects most people negatively, especially the underprivileged. We did a lot of research to figure out what our wedge into healthcare would be, and pharmacy jumped out to us. Essentially, pharmacy is the healthcare industry’s consumer product, and consumer products just happens to be our area of expertise.

If you think about it, pharmacy is a product not unlike Facebook; almost everybody in the country uses at some point in their life. But evidence suggests it’s generally a bad one. The net promoter score of chain pharmacies is somewhere in the vicinity of -10. That’s shockingly bad. (For reference, American Airlines has a net promoter score of four.) Our research also found that more than 35% of all medications sent to pharmacies are never picked up as a result of some upstream issue.

It became clear to us that none of the pharmacy incumbents thought of themselves like a product, and especially not one that is consumer focused. None of them had the mindset to prioritize and optimize the user experience, which is the mindset Silicon Valley applies to photo-sharing apps and ad optimization tools and all sorts of other products we aren’t so passionate about. Instead, pharmacy incumbents focus on extracting value from the system and pushing the cost off onto patients. In that gap, we saw opportunity — and a moral imperative.

Today, Alto is making pharmacy convenient, accessible, and user-friendly. We make it easy for consumers to get information on their medications so that they can make informed healthcare decisions. To get there, we have built and continually work to improve a robust set of user-facing and internal tools to guide consumers through the complex and often barrier-laced process of prescription procurement, payer authorization, and medication fulfillment.

Because health outcomes are what we care about, we’re not pushing pills for profit. We are just as happy if a patient pursues an alternative therapy so long as it is in his or her best clinical interest. Our unique business and operational models make that possible.

In disrupting an industry that can be predatory to the most vulnerable among us, I am proud to say Alto attracts some of the most ethical, altruistic talent I have ever worked with. They make coming to work a pleasure and a privilege, and that makes all the difference, not just in my mornings but also my professional satisfaction and overall well-being. If any of that resonates with you, you might be just our type.

"Work With People Who Share Your Passion"

At Alto, we’re putting patients first with free, same-day medication delivery; always-there, cost-saving support from our dedicated pharmacists and care team; and a cheerful online interface where people can conveniently manage all their prescriptions. Here’s how we make it work.

How Alto Pharmacy Is Using Tech to Put Patients First

Above all, Alto Pharmacy strives to fulfill medicine’s true purpose — to improve quality of life — for everyone who needs it. In working toward that mission, we’re building technology to disrupt the healthcare industry, which has long deprioritized the patient experience. At Alto, we’re putting patients first with free, same-day medication delivery; always-there, cost-saving support from our dedicated pharmacists and care team; and a cheerful online interface where people can conveniently manage all their prescriptions. Here’s how we make it work.

At the highest level, Alto is a pharmacy. But we are not a traditional pharmacy. Instead of operating dozens of small-volume distribution sites across a metro area like chain pharmacies, we own and operate high-volume pharmacy fulfillment centers staffed by small, highly efficient teams supported by proprietary technology. We have one fulfillment center per metro area that we serve, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Orange County, and a headquarters in Denver, where we are centralizing and growing our care operations team. Out of our fulfillment centers, we process and fill prescription orders and hand deliver them directly to patients’ homes or offices. About seven million people fall within the delivery zone of our San Francisco fulfillment center alone. In Southern California, our delivery radius covers another 20 million people.

Our model is made possible thanks to three Alto products:

With the easy-to-use Alto Patient app, people can consult a friendly and knowledgeable Alto pharmacist, schedule deliveries, and otherwise manage and learn more about their medications. Through the Alto Patient app, our care team also works with people to find them ways to save on their prescription costs.

AltoMD is our physician-facing product that allows physicians to easily manage the pharmacy needs of their patients that use Alto. The beauty of AltoMD is that it simplifies the workflows of the medical practices that use it. The typical clinic spends an average of 20 hours of administrative time per physician, per week, just on pharmacy workflows. In relieving practices of many of these administrative tasks, Alto reduces the likelihood of human error and redirects physicians’ time and energies back to their patients. In turn, Alto helps ensure treatment adherence and a better overall healthcare experience, making it a win-win for physicians and patients alike.

Wunderbar is the internal technology our pharmacists and care teams use to manage their workflows. It also controls the robots that fill every prescription order. Wunderbar was built and continues to be improved in house, giving us a strong foundation to grow and scale.

My co-founder, Matt Gamache-Asselin, and I came up with the idea for Alto in 2015, when we were working as software engineers at Parse, a Facebook-owned company. By then, our years in Silicon Valley had left us jaded and disillusioned with a tech industry that had lost sight of what really matters. We watched companies pour their resources into addressing the not-so-meaningful problems of the 1% while the broader population went underserved by many of the technological innovations being developed. We wanted to use our time, energy, and experience in consumer products to build something with the potential to have tangible, positive impact on the lives of all people. That led us first to healthcare — a big, broken industry with a terrible reputation — and then, more specifically, to pharmacy.

Our research revealed that no pharmacy incumbents think of themselves as consumer product companies. Unlike the Facebooks of the world, which are constantly optimizing how people use their products, pharmacy incumbents deprioritize it. We saw that gap as an opportunity to use our technical expertise to bring a people-focused mindset to the industry.

Back then, neither Matt nor I had any pharmacy experience. So, we left our jobs and dove in headfirst. After raising some capital, we purchased and ran a mom-and-pop operation, A-G Pharmacy, that had been serving San Francisco’s Mission District for more than 50 years.

We learned by fire how pharmacies work (and don’t). Soon enough, it became clear to us that despite caring about their patients, the A-G team wasn’t able to give them the best possible experience because they didn’t have the right tools. They were using antiquated software that required clumsy, inefficient work-arounds like relying on analog typewriters to create prescription labels. Because they didn’t have a streamlined operation, patients didn’t receive a streamlined experience.

We further discovered that technology wasn’t connecting the right stakeholders across the industry either. Pharmacy transactions require coordination between the physicians choosing the medication, the insurance companies paying for the medication, the pharmacies filling the orders, and the patients ultimately using the medications. The industry standard has been to conduct that coordination by fax and phone. That makes coordination slow, disjointed, and prone to things falling through the cracks. Patients take the brunt of those issues.

It became clear to us that Alto’s software needed to deeply integrate with and connect the disparate systems that stakeholders use. We also wanted to give stakeholders tools to solve other workflow issues not being addressed by their existing systems. And so Alto’s suite of products came to be.

A single Alto fulfillment center can serve as many people as 400 chain pharmacy locations, and we do it with a much smaller team thanks to our proprietary technology. That saves our company resources that we reinvest in the Alto experience. By way of example, we’ve developed specialized expertise in managing the coordination of complex therapeutics like fertility treatment, psychiatry, dermatology, and HIV prevention and care. The efficiencies we’ve uncovered make lifesaving and life-improving treatments available to people who might otherwise not have access to them.

The result is a system of products and processes that have demonstrated utility for tens of thousands of people and counting. Alto isn’t just convenient; by keeping people well informed about their prescription medications, Alto helps them make the best possible healthcare decisions for themselves and their families. But we’re not stopping there. Alto is poised for growth, and in the coming months and years, we will be rapidly adding to our team to help us build the technology to continue to solve pharmacy’s deep operational issues at scale.

Learn more about our vision, growth trajectory, and the Alto engineering team that makes it all possible.

Women Leading the Way

On International Women’s Day, we’d like to celebrate the women of Alto. Every day, they care for patients, fill prescriptions, build products, and drive growth.

By the numbers, 63% of our employees, 40% of the executive team, and 60% of people leaders on product and engineering are women. In comparison, 20% of tech jobs are held by women and only 11 percent of executive positions at Silicon Valley companies.

This amazing representation was made possible by the company mission and values. The founders recognized that improving the pharmacy experience for a diverse population of patients meant Alto had to be a diverse company, capable of understanding and empathizing with everyone we serve.

Recruiting this talented mix of people has been one of our greatest successes, and today, our team has a broad representation of age, gender, race, sexual orientation, and socio-economic status. Diversity and inclusion is never a solved problem. We still and always will have room to improve, and will continue working hard to ensure D&I are prioritized as we continue to grow.

Focus at Alto: Providing the best care to Alto’s patients

Why did you join Alto? I was originally drawn to Alto for the opportunity to work at a pharmacy that was questioning the status quo and because, quite frankly, I could not possibly fathom how a pharmacy could have so many positive Yelp! reviews and I needed to see it with my own eyes. I quickly learned that the “Patients Come First” mentality was not just for show — it is brought to life every day through our incredible team and serves as the North Star for every strategic decision we make as a company.

Background: CVS Health, Walgreens, Northeastern

Focus at Alto: Keeping patient and provider information secure

Why did you join Alto? As a parent and patient, I am constantly frustrated by how hard it is to interact with doctors and data, in the name of security and privacy. I believe that we can secure patient data, protect their privacy and still make care accessible and convenient. I joined Alto Pharmacy because their passion for patients aligned so well with this belief. Alto feels like the kind of place I can be impactful. Also, the day I interviewed, they had a holiday cookie exchange and I’m a sucker for homemade baked goods.

Background: Mango Health, HP, Fortify Software, MIT

Focus at Alto: Building products that simplify medication management and improve health outcomes

Why did you join Alto? I love working on complex problems and creating user-friendly products to improve people’s lives. Everyone is a patient at some point in their lives, and we can make the experience so much better! The team here rallies around that mission, and approaches each decision with openness, rigorous intellectual honesty, and the desire to improve patients’ lives.

Background: Tesla, Boku, Intuit, QuestBridge, Stanford

FRANCES SCHENDLE, General Manager of Fertility

Focus at Alto: Developing and growing Alto’s Fertility Services

Why did you join Alto? In all my years in healthcare, I have never heard of a pharmacy creating an awesome experience for patients and clinicians! I wanted to be a part of this team’s mission to make healthcare simpler and more affordable for patients. The fertility space is a particularly meaningful area for me, as it is growing quickly but is still such a confusing and expensive journey. I believe Alto’s technology and dedicated fertility team are making this a more positive experience, and I’m excited to share that with more women and families.

Focus at Alto: Building products that transform pharmacy operations

Why did you join Alto? The two most important factors for me in a career move are 1) a clear, compelling company mission and 2) a strong yet humble team. When I met the Alto team, I was thrilled to find not only these attributes, but so much more to love. The founders set out to solve a hard problem, bought a brick and mortar pharmacy to learn the ropes, developed empathy with doctors, pharmacists and patients, and then built products that solved some of their thorniest problems. This approach demonstrates a hard-to-find mix of drive, fearlessness, humility and talent that I saw in droves as I met the rest of the Alto team. As someone who believes healthcare has to be so much better, I’m thrilled to spend my day contributing to that mission, with a team that inspires me… and shares lots of laughs every day!

Background: Granular, Inkling, BrightRoll, Apple, MIT, Berkeley

Why We Prioritize Diversity at Alto

The Alto team has been growing quickly, doubling in the last 6 months, and we are thinking a lot about the importance of diversity to building a world-class company. We are putting a lot of time and energy into making sure we build a diverse team and an inclusive culture, and one of the foundational discussions we’ve had is why diversity matters to us. Aside from the fundamental ethical reasons, having a diverse team is particularly important for us as a healthcare company because it allows us to to empathize with our patients, innovate on our product, and hire the best teammates who share our values.

I wrote an internal post codifying how we prioritize diversity, which we presented at an all-hands meeting, and subsequently in every new hire’s onboarding.

I’m sharing this publicly in hopes that it can help frame how other companies discuss the business case for diversity.

Most of any success I’ve had comes down to luck. My family prioritized education and had money to spend on it. I went to an elite prep school, then MIT, then had my first ever job at Facebook. Each step led to the next, with a lot of help along the way. In my time in Silicon Valley, I’ve seen the limits of my well-off, millennial, straight, white, male perspective. I’ve seen the ways that my type of privilege leads to the proliferation of companies building photo sharing apps and other tools that make life easier for the 1%. The massive changes in technology in the last decade have dramatically increased my quality of life, but those who don’t share my privilege have not seen nearly the benefit. Healthcare is clearly broken and hasn’t seen many improvements from improving technology, and many of those most affected by bad healthcare are also the most underserved by the tech industry. We founded Alto to use our backgrounds in tech and our skill sets to try to give some of the benefits of technology to those underserved by the current state of the healthcare industry.

I can have a hard time understanding the thoughts and feelings of our diverse patient base, given my life story and the fact that I’ve never had prescriptions. In the early days of Alto, we primarily dispensed birth control. We thought it was a good beachhead market of young, tech-savvy users, with a long lifetime of monthly refills. We discovered very quickly that birth control has a lot of different brands, some much more expensive than the generic equivalents. I assumed everyone would want the cheaper form, given that they have chemically identical active ingredients. Fortunately, though, some of our earliest teammates were women, and they helped me understand that when dealing with hormones, small differences can really affect how you feel. We then asked our patients about side effects they’d encountered switching to generics and found out how common these issues really were, and how frustrating it could be when the pharmacy tried to switch them to a generic. Now, we make sure to stock every brand of birth control.

In trying to empathize with our patients and my teammates here at Alto, I have seen firsthand the benefits of a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. We realize that we are a company founded by millennial white males from relatively privileged backgrounds. This makes it even more pressing that we focus our energy on building a diverse team and inclusive culture.

Diversity means many different things to different people, so I think it’s important to define exactly what we mean here. What we’re really after is diversity of thought and skills applied towards a singular mission with unifying values. It’s not always easy to know whether someone has a different way of thinking about the world, so we often use proxies to accomplish this. By attempting to build a team with a broad representation of ability, age, education, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, and personality type, we can hopefully build a team that also brings a diversity of thought and experiences.

As a pharmacy, we have one of the most diverse user bases of any product. Almost everyone uses the pharmacy at some point in their life, and so the population of people that we serve is just as diverse as the entire population. We serve patients of every age, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and socio-economic status. Having a diverse team allows us to understand and empathize with the people Alto serves. We are building the best pharmacy for everybody, everywhere.

One of our core values is “Patients come first,” and in order to truly embody that value, it is imperative that we have a diverse team. Whether we are designing a new feature to improve our fertility onboarding flow, or talking through a complex prior authorization with an elderly medicare patient who knows English only as a second language, having a diverse team helps us to put ourselves in our patients’ shoes and empathize with their challenges.

As a healthcare company, we are often interacting with patients when they are at their most vulnerable.

We have a responsibility to our patients, and the best way to serve them is to be sensitive to their needs and experiences.

Real innovation happens when you combine people from diverse backgrounds, with different skill sets, to solve a hard problem together. Research has shown over and over the positive effect of diversity on innovation (here, here), and diversity played a key role in many of the greatest inventions of all time. The transistor, a critical building block of the modern computer, was invented at Bell Labs in the 1940s, by a diverse group of scientists and engineers. According to Walter Isaacson,

“The lesson of Bell Labs is that most feats of sustained innovation cannot and do not occur in an iconic garage or the workshop of an ingenious inventor. They occur when people of diverse talents and mind-sets and expertise are brought together.”

Fixing the broken pharmacy industry is an extremely difficult challenge, and we will need a broad range of people, with different ways of thinking, to help solve it. An engineer can quickly write code to automate a tedious task that a pharmacist has to do everyday, like looking up patients to reach out to those who may want a consultation. A pharmacy technician can easily help a designer figure out what the right packaging looks like for fertility ancillary items. By building a team where people with different backgrounds, skill sets, and ways of thinking collaborate daily, eat lunch with each other, and form relationships, we enable more of these interactions, where teammates help solve each other’s problems from different perspectives.

We have hired many of the best people from the tech and healthcare industries, from many different backgrounds. We want to keep doing that.

Most A-players who share our values do not want to work on a team as the only member of a small minority. Neither do they want to work on a team of only people like themselves.

By recruiting a world-class, diverse team, we are in turn enabling ourselves to recruit more world-class, diverse people. It has a compounding effect.

Many of the most talented people who share our company values of empathy, humility, and putting patients first also enjoy working with teammates with different backgrounds and experiences. We enjoy learning from each other and being open minded, and believe that we learn things from each other that actually make us better at our jobs. We feel that a diverse team makes us happier and more productive, and that the best people who share our values feel this way too.

We are all working at Alto because we care about helping people and care about making the world a better place. It is well-known the tech industry has a massive problem with under-representation. Women are under-represented by a factor of 4, and Black and Latino minorities are under-represented by a factor of 2. Women leave tech at more than twice the rate men do, and women are under-represented in leadership positions in tech by a factor of 10.

A study by the Kapor Institute earlier this year found that the primary reason women and under-represented minorities leave their jobs was due to unfairness in the workplace. At Alto, we value fairness and equality as important moral foundations, and work to promote those values in the workplace. We find it sickening to read over and over again about sexual harassment, stereotyping, and unfair treatment in the tech industry, and we want to do something about it. By actively committing to diversity and inclusion at Alto, we hope to do our small part in helping to change the industry for the better.

This post is all about the “why” when thinking about diversity at Alto, and in the future we will be sharing more about what we are actually doing to make sure that we have a diverse team and inclusive culture. We’ve put a lot of work into diversity and inclusion so far, and made some great progress, but we understand there is always more we can do and this is a challenge that will never be “done.” This post is intended only to lay the foundation for taking initiative to improve diversity here at Alto. Without actual changes this is all just talk.

As a mission-driven healthcare company, there are clearly many important reasons why we care about diversity. It helps us empathize with our patients, innovate on our product, hire the best teammates, and change the tech industry for the better. We are growing quickly, so now is the time to double down on our commitment to having a diverse team. It is not something that happens on its own, and will take a lot of work from all of us to foster the inclusive environment in which a diverse team thrives, but we wholeheartedly believe it will be worth it.

ScriptDash is a modern pharmacy that delivers your prescriptions, same-day, to your home or office. We’ve automated most of what your local pharmacy does and we deliver. It’s pretty rad.

My First Week at ScriptDash

Beginnings are special. After four amazing years building the Optimizely rocketship, I’ve begun a new journey with ScriptDash.

A Slack bot posts every NPS survey response we get from a patient that’s just received a delivery. Throughout the day these will light up Slack, and they’re a joy to read.

What’s struck me most this week is how deeply everyone here cares about patient outcomes and improving healthcare. The current system is outdated. Broken. It not only causes millions of headaches, it also costs thousands of lives. Hundreds of thousands, in fact.

When people don’t take their medication as directed (or at all), the results can sometimes be fatal. This is called non-adherence. The CDC says non-adherence causes 125,000 deaths annually, or ~340 deaths per day. How does this happen?

The patient isn’t able to get to a pharmacy on time, safely, or at all.

The patient can’t afford the copay because their doctor inadvertently selected a drug that wasn’t covered by their insurance.

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