How to choose a hospice PBM is a question hospice administrators typically face during a contract renewal, an EMR migration, or a period of rapid growth, and it is a bigger decision than it first appears. The partner you choose affects how fast nurses get medications to patients, how predictable your per-patient-day pharmacy spend stays, and how much administrative work your team carries every single day.
Too often, this decision gets made on a single sales conversation or a familiar name. A structured evaluation framework, applied consistently to every option, produces a decision that holds up months later, after the contract is signed and the relationship is what actually matters.
In most hospices, this decision does not fall to one person. An administrator typically owns the process, but a real evaluation pulls in a director of nursing who understands daily workflow friction, a finance lead who understands per-patient-day economics, and often an IT or EMR administrator who understands integration requirements. Naming these stakeholders early, before demos begin, keeps the evaluation from becoming a single person's opinion dressed up as an organizational decision.
Built exclusively for hospice, BetterRX operates differently from the traditional PBM model. Intelligent Medication Management puts ordering, approvals, prescribing, and reporting on one platform, and BetterRX offers transparent, pass-through pricing with no markups on medication or delivery costs. Formulary updates happen directly in the platform, with no change fees and no phone calls required.
BetterRX publishes its own results against these three dimensions. Across 30+ evaluation areas, clients gave BetterRX 94% Overall Client Satisfaction (BetterRX's 2026 Voice of the Customer survey). By dimension:
Sources: BetterRX's Voice of the Customer survey across six consecutive years; 7-second figure from the 2026 Voice of Customer Survey Results. Read the full framework, including a complete evaluation checklist, in the white paper "How to Evaluate Hospice Medication Management Software and Solutions."
That quote captures what Step 2 of this framework is actually trying to measure: not whether a vendor says its support is responsive, but whether clients experience it that way in practice. (Source: www.betterrx.com/testimonials)
A structured evaluation protects more than the contract. It protects Patient Care by choosing a partner with proven fulfillment reliability, it protects Nurse Satisfaction by choosing a workflow your team will actually use well, and it protects Predictable PPD by locking in transparent pricing before problems appear on an invoice months later.
Consider an administrator at a hospice preparing to open its third location and starting a PBM search. Step 1 reveals that the real priority is not pricing alone, since the current partner is already competitively priced, but workflow consolidation: nurses at the two existing locations are paying the "Toggle Tax," toggling between a PBM portal, a separate ePrescribe tool, and a spreadsheet for tracking refill timing.
Step 2 scores four vendors against the same three dimensions, and nurse time savings immediately separates the finalists from the rest: two vendors still require a separate ePrescribe login, while two offer a single connected workflow. Step 3 verification calls with reference clients confirm which of the remaining two actually delivers on that promise in daily use, rather than just in the demo.
The result is a decision the administrator can explain clearly to the board: not "we picked the biggest name" or "we picked the cheapest option," but "we picked the platform that solved the specific workflow problem slowing our nurses down, and we verified that claim with three reference clients before signing."