How a Creighton alum's $875 million idea helped change an industry

In our Fast Forward series, we profile alumni doing unique, interesting and meaningful work in their fields, inviting each to connect the support they received at Creighton, however long past, to the person they are today. See more Fast Forward features here.

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By Micah Mertes

Creighton alumnus Michael Rea came up with his $875 million idea at the pharmacy window of a Kansas City Walgreens when a woman named Betty asked him which of her eight medications she could skip that month. She was living paycheck to paycheck and couldn’t afford them all.

Rea, PHARMD'07, quickly determined that none of the medications were “nice-to-haves.” Betty needed all of them. She had diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and each of the medications helped her manage those conditions. Rea didn’t know what to tell her.

He went home that night and looked into Betty’s eight different medications, researching alternative therapies, “clipping” coupons and exploring every cost-saving option at Betty’s disposal. 

The next day, Rea gave Betty some information for her doctor. Within 24 hours, she returned to the pharmacy with new prescriptions, the overall price tag $250 less than the initial medication list.

“At that moment, it became really clear to me just how difficult it was to be a pharmacy consumer,” Rea says. “Here I was, a professional pharmacist working in a retail environment every day. I was well-suited to go through this process, and it still took me six hours to figure this all out.”

How could a non-expert like Betty be expected to navigate something so complicated?

That problem was the premise for Rea's business: Rx Savings Solutions.

RxSS isn’t to be confused with GoodRx, which also helps people save money on their medications. GoodRx works directly with consumers looking for prescription discounts at major pharmacies. RxSS works with members through their employer or health plan to find cost-saving opportunities in their network.

Rea started RxSS as a one-man operation in 2008, a year after graduating from Creighton’s School of Pharmacy and Health Professions. It began as a passion project he pursued on nights and weekends. Using a website and social media, Rea took requests from hundreds of pharmacy consumers around the country, people like Betty.

“It was such a low-tech operation at first,” Rea says. “I was using a pen and paper to go through each individual’s drugs and pharmacy costs and then sending them solutions in a Word doc. At the time, I never expected this to be a profitable business. I just wanted to help people.”

By the spring of 2012, his number of clients had grown enough that he decided to quit his day job. For the first few years, he raised money from friends and family to keep RxSS running. Rea and his slowly growing team spent that time improving their site’s user interface while building and refining their platform’s software and algorithm to scale the service to a greater number of members.

In 2014, Rea caught his big break, securing a contract with the State of Kansas Employee Health Plan to serve about 100,000 employees. A contract with Berkshire Hathaway Media followed, then Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, which brought another half a million people onto the platform.

This drew the eye of investors in Kansas City and Omaha — including the Omaha-based private equity firm McCarthy Capital — with RxSS raising tens of millions of dollars over the next few years and growing its staff and member base significantly. Rea’s wife, Brandy Kopecky Rea, JD’07, whom he met at Creighton, joined him at RxSS as the company’s general counsel.

By the time McKesson Corporation acquired RxSS for $875 million in 2022, Rea’s startup had 280 employees who served 17 million members at, among other employers, 55 Fortune 500 companies (including Boeing, Target, Toyota, Petco and United Airlines) and a dozen Blue Cross Blue Shield plans across the country.

No matter how big the company became, Rea says, they kept it focused on the needs of the individual.

“Every two weeks, we had an all-company meeting,” Rea says, “and we always kicked it off with a story from a member, stories very similar to the one that started the company. A teacher who couldn’t afford her son’s ADHD meds or a heart patient who couldn’t afford the blood pressure medication she needed. It was important to have this constant reinforcement that while, yes, we were trying to grow a business, we were also doing good for people. We were there to help people, real people, save money on their medications. That was the point.”

Rea, CEO of RxSS for 15 years, left the company in the fall of 2023. Today, he and Brandy live in Kansas City with their three children: Brody, Carson and Stella. Brody, 14, has profound autism. He inspired his parents to use their funds from the McKesson sale to establish the Michael and Brandy Rea Family Foundation, which supports nonprofits serving the special needs community.

“Brody will never live on his own,” Michael Rea says. “He will always need caregivers. And what we’ve found with his peers and their parents and our friends is that there’s this gap. There’s a gap in job training. There’s a gap in living and congregation spaces. We’re trying to focus our dollars on helping this community by filling those gaps.”

One example is the Blue Valley School District, which Brody attends. The Reas helped the district start a food pantry staffed with high school students with special needs, a project addressing both food insecurity and job training for an oft-neglected group.

Rea says Brody is “tremendously inspirational to me. Because while he has so many things that are harder for him, he also experiences the world in a beautiful way. He doesn’t care what house you live in or what car you drive. He cares about getting and giving a good hug. He cares about people being good to each other. He has character traits that everyone wishes they had. He keeps us all grounded on the things that truly matter.”

Rea comes from Lansing, Iowa, a town of about 800, so when he arrived in Omaha in 2003 to start pharmacy school at Creighton, the city felt like a bustling metropolis.

“I was really impressed with Creighton’s campus and the technology and innovation they were embracing,” Rea says. “They also taught me about the business side of healthcare.”

Rea took a pharmacoeconomics class from Robert Garis, an associate professor of pharmacy sciences who spent his last decade exposing costly and questionable practices in the industry. Garis died of cancer in 2009.

“Working with Dr. Garis and having that business component in addition to the core curriculum really benefited me when I started my own company,” Rea says. “It was a critical part of how my story unfolded. It’s one thing to have an idea. It’s another to navigate through health plans, pharmacy benefit managers, pharmacies and working with countless other people to implement that idea.”

But what Rea found at Creighton was more than expertise in pharmacy and business. It was something more profound, all-encompassing.

“Creighton set the foundation for the rest of my life,” he says. “I met my wife there, most importantly. And we both recall being around a group of people who were so professionally driven but also just such good human beings. That sets the kind of tone that makes you want to be a better human being yourself.”

Since he left RxSS about a year ago, Rea has spent much of his time doing the things he’s wanted to do for years: volunteering at his children’s schools, coaching their teams and sharing as many moments with them as possible.

The work of the family’s foundation continues, as well. But Rea is also thinking about what comes next. What new idea will launch a new phase in his career?

“Whatever it is, I want it to be service-focused,” he says. “I keep thinking back to the combination of Rx Savings Solutions: creating a strong business that also does good for a lot of people. That’s my focus no matter what: What are people struggling with, and how can I help?”