Healthcare has never functioned like a normal market. If you’ve worked in or studied this space long enough, that’s not a radical statement. It’s just reality. Prices are opaque, choices are constrained, and incentives are misaligned. Market power accrues to intermediaries, not innovators or patients. And the information imbalance between stakeholders isn’t just large, it's institutionalized.

These are classic signs of dysfunction and they are not new. In the late 1950s, Senator Estes Kefauver led hearings on rising drug prices. He put it simply: "While this country has the best drugs in the world, it would appear from the great number of letters which the subcommittee has received that many of our citizens are experiencing difficulty in being able to purchase them." That tension is still with us. We build remarkable science, but we price it through systems that obscure value, inhibit access, and reward opacity. But that doesn’t mean the system can’t be fixed.

That’s part of why I joined Serif Health. I’ve spent my career analyzing these distortions: in research, in policy evaluation, and in consulting. I’ve seen how even the most sophisticated healthcare organizations and life sciences leaders struggle to navigate the fog. What impressed me about Serif wasn’t just the data infrastructure (though that’s critical). It was the clarity of purpose. The team didn’t start by building a product. They started by asking why price transparency matters.

Like Simon Sinek argues in Start With Why, people don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. Serif’s why is simple: make healthcare markets fairer, more functional, and more data-driven by surfacing the prices that shape them, ultimately lowering costs and promoting higher-value care.

Why Transparency Is the First Step Toward a Functioning US Healthcare System

The economic case for transparency is foundational. For markets to work, buyers and sellers need to know the price. In healthcare, we’ve tolerated the opposite. Historically, negotiated rates between payers and providers—let alone net prices for therapies—have been hidden. Patients see sticker prices or no pricing at all. Providers see fee schedules. Life sciences teams and pharmacies often see nothing at all or rely on years-old claims data.

Transparency doesn’t solve everything, but it gives us a place to start. Innovative, disruptive companies such as Cost Plus Drugs and transparent PBMs and health plans have shown that radical transparency can drive down prices and pressure legacy intermediaries. Congress recently reintroduced bipartisan PBM transparency legislation to ban spread pricing and mandate rebate disclosures, while the FTC continues its investigation into PBM contracting practices.

Serif’s work, building the most accurate, validated, and queryable database of payer-provider negotiated rates sourced from Transparency in Coverage data, is a massive step forward. The team turned machine-readable files into decision-ready tools. This includes benchmarking platforms for employers and benefit consultants, rate intelligence for health systems, and now pricing strategy solutions for life sciences. This infrastructure, necessary given the massive data size and complexity of a US system with tens of thousands of insurance plans, allows healthcare organizations to better understand the value of their work. We don’t just parse rate files, we cross-reference them with claims and utilization data to confirm negotiated prices reflect actual payment flows relevant to providers and pharmacies.

Why It Matters for Life Sciences and What Comes Next

Nowhere is the value of transparency more urgent than in drug pricing. We’re entering an era of one-time therapies, gene editing, and personalized care. The science is extraordinary but the economics are existential.

Here’s the paradox: these treatments offer profound long-term value but are priced and compete through systems built for chronic, recurring drugs. Without transparency, stakeholders can’t model value, benchmark pricing, or structure innovative contracts, resulting in slower access, reduced investment, and missed opportunities.

Serif’s expansion into life sciences reflects that urgency. We’re developing tools that help pharma and biotech leaders answer essential questions:

• How are our therapies priced across payers, geographies, and sites of care?
• What are our gross-to-net dynamics and how do they compare to competitors?
• How do our net prices relate to ASP, 340B, and international benchmarks? 340B was created to support safety-net providers, but a 2023 GAO report found that program oversight gaps have enabled covered entities to receive median discounts exceeding 43% without requirements to pass savings to patients.
• How can we use this visibility to build better partnerships, support contracting, drive R&D, and improve access?

We’re also aligned with the broader movement to redefine value. Drug pricing is a top trend for ISPOR this year; the ISPOR Value Flower highlights elements like equity, real option value, and scientific spillovers. These aren’t always captured in cost per quality-adjusted life year metrics, but they’re central to how healthcare should work. Transparency makes it possible to surface these elements and act on them.

Why Now

The Congressional Budget Office projects that the recently passed 'One Big Beautiful Bill' will result in about 11.8 million additional uninsured Americans by 2034 due to cuts in Medicaid and ACA subsidies. That loss of coverage only raises the stakes for transparency: when more people are exposed to list prices and market rate variation without insurance buffers, the risk of catastrophic spending grows.

Policy, data, and industry needs are aligning. The Inflation Reduction Act’s drug price negotiations and other federal actions are bringing price negotiation to the largest US health care purchaser. Transparency in Coverage and Hospital Price Transparency rules require price disclosure. Employers and benefits administrators are asking new questions and increasingly embracing their fiduciary responsibilities. But turning data into insight takes more than fancy tech or a team of consultants. It takes context, trust, and a clear sense of why.

That’s the part that excites me most about Serif. I’ve worked across academia, consulting, and health tech. But I’ve rarely seen a team so focused on solving something this fundamental. Rafiq, Matt, and the team started Serif with a mission, not a menu or dreams of one-platform-to-rule them all. That shows in what they’ve built so far and in what comes next.

Because transparency isn’t just about seeing prices. It’s about seeing clearly enough to act.

If this mission resonates, if your why includes building smarter, more cost-effective healthcare markets and more equitable access, reach out  to us at hello@serifhealth.com. Let’s build it together.

Bill Pajerowski, PhD
General Manager, Life Sciences
Serif Health