Centralizing medication discounts for patients, doctors, and caregivers

In Chile, medicines are particularly expensive for people. That’s why discount programs are a high-value support, especially for chronic patients, who have to buy their medication month after month.

Laboratorio Chile’s medicines are discounted through several programs: Chile Salud, Fonasa (public health insurance), GES (guaranteed health coverage), pharmacy loyalty clubs, and special discounts. However, the information about them is scattered, and each program has its own rules and formats. In practice, patients depend on whatever they are offered at the pharmacy counter.

This scenario affects three groups of people:

• Chronic patients and older adults, who make sizable monthly purchases and are the ones who lose the most savings.
• Doctors, who are often unaware of these programs and avoid recommending them so as not to be associated with a particular laboratory or pharmacy.
• The laboratory’s medical sales representatives, who lacked a clear tool to communicate these benefits.

On top of this, there were significant constraints:

• Chile’s Drug Law prohibits the direct promotion of prices and offers, so the portal had to inform without inducing a purchase.
• The loyalty programs of the large pharmacy chains are deeply ingrained in patients’ minds.
• Previous similar initiatives had failed to gain adoption.

We designed a portal that goes beyond information. It brings together in one place everything a patient needs to know about their medication: what it is for, which discounts it has, how to redeem them, and where to buy it.

The findings were translated into a pyramid of needs with three levels: the basics, the valued, and the surprising. This pyramid shaped the MVP scope and laid out an evolutionary vision for later stages.

We redesigned the categorization so each medication can be found by name, active ingredient, therapeutic category, or alphabetical index. In listings, users can refine results by discount program, discount range, pharmaceutical form, classification, bioequivalence, and generics. This improves the traceability of each product and reduces the search effort for people who don’t remember the exact name of their medication.

One of the main design challenges was building a consistent product card capable of clearly showing highly heterogeneous information: fixed percentages, “up to” discounts, tiered per-unit promotions, and multiple programs associated with the same drug. The resulting component absorbs all those variants while keeping a stable reading hierarchy, which makes it possible to compare products at a glance.

The product page consolidates all the relevant medication information in one place:

• Available discounts, organized by program, with the benefit each pharmacy offers and an explanation of how to use it.
• Nearby pharmacies with stock, recommended based on the user’s location, with distance, opening hours, and directions.
• Patient leaflet, reorganized into navigable sections (indications, dosage, warnings, interactions, among others), downloadable as a PDF and available as audio.
• Sharing and printing options, designed so doctors and caregivers can communicate the benefit without recommending a specific pharmacy.

For each type of program, a three-step flow (find your medication, review the discounts, present your coupon) explains in a simple, friendly way how to access the benefit. This reduces uncertainty at one of the most confusing points for patients.