Epic is introducing Prescription Marketplace, a new offering designed to show clinicians and health systems pharmacies' cash prices for medications alongside what a patient would pay with insurance. The company said the product will make it easier to compare the cost of a medication with or without insurance across different pharmacies, with release planned for summer 2027.
Epic framed the launch around a practical adherence problem: more than 40% of American adults do not take their medications as prescribed because of cost concerns. Joel Jones, Epic’s vice president of clinicals and therapeutics and patient safety officer, said putting lower-cost options, including cash prices, into prescriber and patient workflows could help remove a major barrier to patients taking prescribed medicines.
The Commercial Picture
The product builds on Epic’s Real-Time Prescription Benefit feature, which already shows clinicians what a patient will pay with insurance and provides generic alternatives. Epic said that feature helped save patients more than $250 million in 2025. Prescription Marketplace extends that logic by adding a direct comparison between insured and cash-pay options, which matters when the lower-cost route may sit outside the insurance benefit.
Cost Plus Drugs and Amazon Pharmacy are among the pharmacies helping Epic build the feature. Mark Cuban, co-founder of Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs, gave one example of the intended use case: if a patient’s insurance puts a prescription at $500 but the same drug is available for $100 at CostPlusDrugs.com, the patient should be able to see that before leaving the doctor’s office.
That positioning points to a broader commercial shift in digital prescribing tools. The value is no longer just showing coverage status or a generic substitute; it is helping clinicians navigate multiple payment paths for the same prescription in real time.
What It Changes In Workflow
Epic said the tool is intended to reduce price surprises in provider workflows and in MyChart, while also cutting back-and-forth among patients, providers, office staff and pharmacists. Jones also said better visibility could help clinicians distinguish between a medication that failed because it was ineffective and one that failed because the patient never filled it, a gap that can be hard to detect when the patient pays with cash.
Jeff Park, president of Waltz Health, called the announcement a step in the right direction but argued that price transparency alone is not the endpoint. He said patients and doctors should not be expected during a doctor visit to sort through prices, benefit rules, coverage, alternatives, pharmacy choices and manufacturer programs, and that technology should do that work in real time and surface the clinically appropriate choice without adding steps.
That critique is also the signal in Epic’s move: the market is moving from transparency tools toward decision-support tools. Epic is addressing a measurable friction point in prescribing, but the next competitive layer will be whether software can translate fragmented pricing inputs into an actionable recommendation inside the clinical workflow.
