By Joshua Murdock, PharmD, BCBBS

AssureCare is an AI-powered population health management company committed to connecting care for health plans and pharmacies. Its AssureRx platform helps pharmacies get credentialed, enrolled, and paid for the clinical services their pharmacists provide.

In September 2026, Kristen Konstantinidis was named Senior Vice President (SVP) of Marketing and Communications at AssureCare. She brings more than 20 years of experience in health technology marketing and communications. She was most recently chief communications officer at Homeward Health, where she built the company’s communications and brand marketing function.

In this exclusive RXinsider interview, Konstantinidis explains why she joined AssureCare, how its message differs for pharmacies and health plans, and how to market a new business model. She also discusses pharmacist provider status, factors that influence buyers’ trust in AI claims, and AssureCare’s goals for the next 2 years.

RXinsider: You most recently built the communications and brand marketing function at Homeward Health. What made AssureCare the right next move?

Konstantinidis: At Homeward, I was reminded how much a brand matters when you’re asking people to trust you with something as personal as their care. When I looked at AssureCare, I saw the opposite problem from most companies I’ve talked to. Usually, the story comes before the product. Here, the product comes before the story.

AssureCare supports more than 60 million lives. One of the largest retail pharmacies runs its clinical pharmacy services on our platform across thousands of locations. We’ve worked with the second-largest payer in the country across multiple lines of business for over a decade. That’s not a startup hoping to prove itself. That’s a company that has quietly done the hard work and hasn’t told the market about it nearly enough. 

For a marketer and communicator, that’s the best possible starting point. I don’t have to invent a reason to believe. I have to make sure people hear it, understand it, and act on it.

RXinsider: Our readers are primarily pharmacies and the vendors who serve them. When telling the AssureCare story to that room instead of to a health plan, what changes?

Konstantinidis: A health plan leader is usually asking, “How do I get one view of my members so I stop paying for fragmentation?” A pharmacy leader is asking something more personal: “How do I get paid for the clinical work my pharmacists are already capable of doing?” 

With health plans, we lead with cost, risk, and coordination. With pharmacies, we lead with the pharmacist. Their license, their time, their ability to run a clinical practice and not just a dispensing operation.

The other thing that changes is scope. When people hear “pharmacy,” they often picture the retail counter. We’re talking about pharmacy across the board, including supermarket pharmacies, specialty pharmacies, and the organizations that work alongside them. The common thread is that each of them has clinical capacity that isn’t fully recognized or reimbursed.

RXinsider: Your AssureRx product is built to help pharmacies get credentialed, enrolled, and paid for clinical services. That could ask a pharmacy to operate differently, not just buy software. How do you market a change in business model?

Konstantinidis: You sell the outcome, and then you make the change feel smaller than people expect. 

Nobody wakes up wanting a new operating model. But many pharmacy leaders wake up wanting a new revenue line, a way to keep good pharmacists from burning out, and a way to stay relevant as dispensing margins continue to shrink. That’s where the conversation starts. Then the job is to show what the change looks like in practice, day to day.

AssureRx handles the parts that make clinical services feel daunting, such as scheduling patients, documenting the visit, and coding and billing. When a pharmacist sees that the workflow is already in place, the “business model change” stops feeling like a leap and starts to feel like a natural next step. And the most persuasive marketing here isn’t coming from us. It’s a pharmacy that looks like yours, already doing it, already getting paid.

RXinsider: The industry has been saying pharmacists are providers for well over a decade, and reimbursement still hasn’t caught up everywhere. How do you make that message actually land?

Konstantinidis: Stop saying it as a slogan and start showing it as a claim. “Pharmacists are providers” is something people believe even outside the industry, but the federal government has not recognized that status just yet, and it will still take time. That makes it feel abstract, but the message that lands is specific: this pharmacist, in this state, delivered this service, documented it this way, billed it to this payer, and got paid.

That’s where we have a real advantage, because we sit on both sides. We work with health plans and with pharmacies. We can talk to a plan about why pharmacist-delivered care makes financial and clinical sense, and talk to a pharmacy about how to deliver it in a way the plan will reimburse. 

When both sides work from the same documentation and dataset, the conversation becomes much less theoretical. So, I’d rather the message be less inspirational and more practical. The inspiration has been there for 10 years. What’s been missing is the plumbing.

RXinsider: Most healthcare technology companies now have an AI story, and some buyers have become skeptical. What separates an AI claim that a pharmacy or a plan actually believes from one they ignore?

Konstantinidis: Buyers should be skeptical. Right now, “AI-powered” has about the same meaning as “innovative.” It describes almost everyone, so it differentiates no one. 

The AI claims people believe have three things in common. They’re specific about the task: not “AI transforms care,” but “this flags which members need outreach first” or “this cuts the time to document a visit.” They’re grounded in the workflows people already use, rather than being a separate tool someone has to remember to open. And they come with a number someone can check.

I’d also say the data underneath matters more than the model on top. Anyone can license a capable model now. What you can’t buy overnight is years of longitudinal history across payers and pharmacies. That’s what makes an insight trustworthy, and it’s where we want to keep the conversation.

My rule for our own marketing is simple. If we can’t explain what the AI does in one sentence in a way a pharmacist would recognize from their day-to-day, we shouldn’t lead with it.

RXinsider: What does success look like for you at AssureCare 1 to 2 years from now?

Konstantinidis: When someone in pharmacy or at a health plan hears “AssureCare,” they will know what we do, not just that we exist. 

Brian Litten, AssureCare’s EVP of Growth and Commercialization, recently talked with RXinsider about AssureCare being a bit of a well-kept secret, and that’s exactly what it is today. We have the scale and the customers. What we need is a clear, consistent story that people can repeat, about how we give health plans a command center, one connected, real-time view of their members, and give pharmacies the infrastructure to practice and get paid as clinical providers.

If in 2 years our customers are telling that story for us, our sales team is walking into conversations where the buyer already understands our value, and pharmacy leaders see AssureRx as the obvious way to build a clinical practice, I’ll feel like we’ve done the job.