Meet Magellan Rx Management: An app that simplifies pharmacy benefits

You’ve probably had an experience that went something like this: Your doctor prescribes medication to help with your condition. So you go to the local pharmacy to pick it up. But, do you know what happens in between? Your prescription flows through a pharmacy benefit manager, which validates clinical criteria, negotiates coverage, and ensures that you are able to get the medication you need — when you need it.

Understanding your prescription benefits and how they are integrated into your healthcare journey is essential.

That’s where the Magellan Rx app can help — and we’re proud to share this lovable app designed and developed in collaboration with Magellan Rx.

The problem the Magellan Rx app solves

Magellan Rx is a national pharmacy benefits manager (PBM) that provides employer health plan, government, and specialty pharmacy programs. The Magellan Rx app helps members truly understand their pharmacy benefits and options. From detailed clinical information about prescriptions to transparent pricing filters, the app is designed to better explain pharmacy benefits.

The Magellan Rx app provides transparent pricing to compare pharmacies and delivery options.

Magellan Rx engaged ArcTouch for assistance with improving the Magellan Rx digital experience by building its first mobile app. Previously, member services and resources were only available through a website. Delivering a modern app-based experience for iOS and Android added to Magellan Rx’s digital leadership role in the PBM industry.

The company also wanted to improve the information and resources available to members by adding rich educational content to the app to improve the process of purchasing medication — along with helping members save on costs.

The Magellan Rx app helps users see and understand their prescription status.

Prescribing an accessible, secure healthcare solution

Creating mobile applications for any healthcare service requires tremendous scrutiny and care when it comes to user privacy and personal data security. For the Magellan Rx app, that meant using third-party components that were also secure and compliant with privacy laws.

The company also wanted to make sure the app was accessible to better serve those with disabilities. From the very start of the project, we made accessible app design and development a priority. We designed the user experience to not only include today’s standard accessibility features — but also to optimize the user interface to deliver the best possible experience for all users. Just a few examples:

• Supporting screen-reading within all screens in the app.

• Offering font scaling throughout the app.

• Using a simplified color scheme, so as to provide contrast within the UI while also being sensitive to color-blindness.

• Including clear, simple UI copy — and making navigation straightforward — especially for those using screen readers.

The Magellan Rx app includes support for accessibility features, including font scaling, for both Android and iOS.

Magellan Rx app project highlights

One of the aspects of this project I’m most proud of is our team’s collective technical accomplishments. To start, we made an important up-front decision to use Flutter, a cross-platform development framework. We had a single Flutter development team instead of separate iOS and Android teams. It also helped us get the first release — our minimum lovable product (MLP) — to market as efficiently as possible. And now that the apps are released, we can manage the lifecycle and continuously improve both iOS and Android versions using a single codebase, rather than working separately in the native tools.

While the Flutter ecosystem is rapidly maturing, we experienced a few technical barriers because the language is still relatively new. For example, we implemented OKTA to help with biometric authentication and single sign-on (SSO). However, OKTA doesn’t provide an SDK for Flutter, so we had to build native solutions for both versions. Another example: We used the Charles Debugging Proxy as one of our quality assurance tools — but there’s very little information available for how to apply it in Flutter. So, we had to do some design thinking.

We’re also really proud of the team’s integration of biometric authentication for both iOS (Touch ID and Face ID) and Android (fingerprint) using Flutter.

The Magellan Rx app supports fingerprint authentication (Android and iOS) and Face ID (iOS).

Communication FTW

Around here, we talk a lot in terms of lean product development, agile sprints, and rapid continuous improvement. All those phrases imply velocity. Communication is fundamental to maintaining that pace while building successful apps, among our internal team members and with our clients. Our collaboration with the Magellan Rx team during this project was crucial to staying aligned on the app vision while making daily micro-decisions to keep the project moving.

We were fortunate to have such a supportive and thoughtful client team. And we’re so proud that Magellan’s leadership felt similarly about our team members:

“ArcTouch team members immersed themselves early on in understanding the PBM industry, and the experience we want to deliver to our customers and members,” said Sofiane Sirajeddine, senior director of digital transformation for Magellan Rx Management. “They are constantly coming up with ideas, looking at data to back up the decisions that we make, and helping us figure it out. They identify critical gaps that we’re trying to solve for, and come up with creative solutions — constantly wanting to improve — and being flexible at any given time.”

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