At HIMSS 2026, the most important breakthroughs weren't always the loudest. Amid a show floor crowded with AI demos and new platforms, some of the most meaningful conversations centered on a quieter, more persistent problem: how to make medications affordable for the patients who need them. In episode 6 of Doceree Dialogue – Chapter HIMSS, Chris Jacobs, CEO of Glic Health, joined host Vijay Adapala, Chief Business Development Officer at Doceree, to unpack why affordability is less about access than awareness and how embedding savings into the prescribing workflow could reshape the patient experience.
Glic Health has spent more than fifteen years building toward that mission. What began in 2010 as a college-era idea has grown into a patient affordability company built around a free prescription discount card one now accepted across major retail pharmacies nationwide and, increasingly, integrated directly into the systems where care begins.
Jacobs founded Glic Health in 2010, while he was still in college. The original concept was rooted in the marketplace thinking that defined that era of the consumer internet building a two-sided platform connecting buyers and sellers. In the process, he discovered the world of prescription discount cards and the cash-pay prescription space, and saw an opportunity worth building a company around.
Sixteen years later, the mission has only sharpened. Glic Health focuses on patients who fall into one of three situations: those without health insurance, those whose insurance doesn't cover a prescribed drug, and those facing a high copay on a particular medication. For those patients a group Jacobs notes is unfortunately large the company's discount card unlocks savings at nearly every major retail pharmacy in the country, from national chains like Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart to mid-market grocery and pharmacy chains.
"The problem we're solving comes down to one of three use cases — a patient doesn't have insurance, their insurance doesn't cover the drug, or they have a high copay on that drug," Jacobs explained.
One of the most important questions in patient affordability is deceptively simple: when patients skip a medication because of cost, is the real barrier access to savings programs, or awareness that they exist? For Jacobs, the answer leans clearly toward awareness.
"It's definitely a combination of both, but I'd lean more toward awareness. The access is there — these programs are everywhere," he said.
The challenge, in other words, isn't building more affordability programs. It's making sure patients — and the providers who guide them — actually know those options exist at the moment they matter most. Often that comes down to information patients simply don't have, like the fact that prices can vary significantly from one pharmacy to the next. As Jacobs put it, most people don't realize that the Walgreens across the street from a Walmart might offer a better price on the exact same prescription. Surfacing that kind of insight at the point of care — and letting patients choose where to fill based on real pricing — is where Glic Health sees its biggest opportunity.
If awareness is the barrier, providers are uniquely positioned to remove it. They are, as Jacobs put it, the people best placed to educate patients at the exact moment a prescription is written.
"At the end of the day, the providers are the ones who can educate the patient," he said.
The benefits run in both directions. Helping a patient save money is good for the patient — full stop — but it also spares the practice the downstream burden of callbacks: requests to switch from a 90- to a 30-day supply, or to move a prescription to a different pharmacy. Each of those is time, staff, and resources spent solving a problem that could have been addressed the moment the script was written.
So why aren't more providers leaning into these programs? By some estimates, billions of dollars in available prescription savings go unclaimed every year. For Jacobs, the explanation is straightforward: providers are stretched thin.
"They're strapped for time — they're seeing so many patients a day," he said.
Asking clinicians to learn yet another system, on top of everything else changing around them, is a hard sell. The answer, Jacobs argues, is to remove the friction entirely — building affordability into the workflow rather than alongside it, automating the savings, surfacing the decision, and giving patients optionality without adding steps for the provider.
"If we can get it all in workflow — nugget-sized information to the provider, instead of them having to go to another platform to look these programs up — hopefully that removes the friction and gets them used a lot more," Jacobs said.
Done well, that approach doesn't just save time; it removes human error from the equation and makes the right choice the easy one.
At a show where, as Jacobs joked, you can't walk ten feet without encountering another AI platform, his approach to the technology is refreshingly grounded. For Glic Health, AI's most immediate value lies in helping partners make sense of the data the company shares back with them — turning utilization data into clear, meaningful dashboards that show exactly how much patients are saving.
Crucially, Jacobs is emphatic that none of it involves protected health information.
"We don't collect, maintain, or store any PHI," he said.
The company works with detailed, fully anonymized script-level data: "We see the individualized script data — it just isn't attached to a name or a human." The result is rich insight into savings and behavior across the business, without the privacy exposure that so often complicates healthcare data — a model that lets partners visualize real impact while keeping patient identity entirely out of the equation.
Asked what healthcare leaders should prioritize over the next five years to make medications truly affordable, Jacobs didn't hesitate: awareness — and a relentless commitment to it.
"I don't see how our system will be sustainable over that period without it. The costs are breaking the system right now," he said.
It's a problem the industry has discussed for a decade, but one Jacobs believes has become acutely real over the last 24 months. He's candid that Glic Health is one solution among several — co-pay assistance programs and others all have a part to play — and that no single company solves affordability alone. But he's equally clear about where the momentum needs to come from.
"It has to come from really smart, innovative health tech leaders," he said. "I don't think we can rely on politicians to figure this out."
That conviction is part of what brought him to HIMSS 2026 — 48 efficient hours among the EHRs, health-tech companies, and partners shaping the space. And by his read, the shift is already underway. "I haven't had a meeting in the last two years where they're not working on it. Everyone's working on it — we can just help them do it better."
At a conference defined by talk of intelligence and automation, Jacobs offered a useful reminder: the most transformative technology in healthcare is often the kind that quietly makes the right choice easier surfacing a better price, sparing a patient an impossible decision, and turning awareness into action at the very moment care begins.