Meet Skin Medicinals, an Online Platform That Aims to Make Customized Topical Prescriptions More Affordable
The company was started by Dhaval Bhanusali, a board-certified dermatologist in New York City, to help make prescription skin care cheaper for all.
Picture this scenario: Your dermatologist prescribes you a generic topical cream, maybe for acne, eczema, or just purely skin-brightening purposes. Yet when you show up to the pharmacy to fill said prescription, instead of costing $15 or so, the pharmacist tells you it’s going to be around $1,000. Yes, just for one tube of cream and yes, even with your insurance. Or, maybe you’re able to fill it with the $35 co-pay on your insurance plan, but the pharmacy still bills your insurance company $1,000, which may cause future co-pays or out-of-pocket expenses to increase exponentially.
For a plethora of reasons, the cost of generic, basic dermatological medications keep soaring. This is precisely what prompted Dhaval Bhanusali, a board-certified dermatologist in New York City, to create Skin Medicinals, an online platform that sells medications for common skin conditions and concerns, like rosacea and scarring, for under $60.
“It is becoming more and more challenging to create treatment plans for my patients because I never know how much the medications are going to cost,” says Kristina Goldenberg, a board-certified dermatologist in New York City, who has no affiliation with Bhanusali or Skin Medicinals. “I now preemptively formulate plan A, plan B, and plan C for every acne patient that I treat, [and] this is secondary to multiple phone calls from pharmacies and/or patients reporting that the medications I prescribed initially are too expensive.”
Realizing the increasing ridiculousness of the situation, Bhanusali founded Skin Medicinals in 2019. Here’s the premise: Dermatologists can select specific generic ingredients to mix together to make a personalized cream — called a compounded medication — for a patient. Then, they send the prescription through the Skin Medicinals portal, and a compounding pharmacy creates the personalized cream and ships it straight to the patient’s front door. All of this is done for a flat-rate fee without involving insurance.
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