Since our launch in August 2018, we continue to be asked, “why is the name 46brooklyn?”

To be honest, this wasn’t a question we ever thought we would need to answer. We launched our website with no plan and no expectations. We figured that we had learned a lot from our time in the pharmacy industry, and due to the frustrating complexity of the U.S. drug pricing system, we set out to educate others about what we had learned. We thought it would at the very least be personal therapy for us; if we were lucky, read by no more than a dozen drug pricing nerds. We wildly underestimated that.

After a wild 2018 and 2019, 46brooklyn somehow went from general obscurity to continued general obscurity – but not necessarily inside drug pricing circles. Our educational work has begun to change the way people look at prescription drug prices and has helped to lead to a higher level of discourse about the nuances and complexities of the prescription drug supply chain. We like to think that we have – at least in some small way – given life to complex and opaque public drug pricing data.

Since our launch, we have evolved our expectations and are working hard to make drug pricing information more usable and digestible for the general public. We received non-profit status in August 2019, and through our board of directors and volunteer staff, we’re now more organized, better resourced, and passionately dedicated to bringing transparency and simplification to the prescription drug supply chain.

But back to that name…

46brooklyn was launched by Eric Pachman and Antonio Ciaccia in August 2018. But really, the idea of 46brooklyn began on January 3, 2018, when Eric’s mom passed away after an 18-month battle with pancreatic cancer.

For anyone that has lost a loved one way too soon, you know that a part of you dies with that person. There is no going back to the way things were. At that point, climbing the corporate ladder suddenly seemed like a pointless and meaningless exercise to Eric. In search of a better meaning and purpose, and to try to create some good from such tragedy, he realized that he wouldn’t find what he was looking for in his then-current career running a small chain of community pharmacies.

As fate would have it, at the same time Eric started searching for something more meaningful to do with his life, he was also knee-deep in the complexity of the prescription drug supply chain, as Ohio began uncovering hundreds of millions of dollars in state overspending on prescription drugs through its Ohio Medicaid program. Eric and Antonio had begun doing data analytics and research to help uncover massive disconnects between pharmacy reimbursements, the actual costs of prescription drugs, and what the state of Ohio was getting charged through its state Medicaid managed care program. Ohio soon became the tip of the spear for pharmacy benefits reform, and Eric and Antonio realized that it was important to begin bringing our learnings to other state Medicaid programs, Medicare Part D, commercial employers, and whomever else cared to listen or read. So, Eric left his job, and with Antonio, started 46brooklyn. There was no funding, no plan, and no concerns about the lack of either. Just a relentless appetite to publish whatever they found, and so they did… and here we are.

So, what’s “46brooklyn?” Surely, it’s our current address? Nope. Maybe the place we met? Not that either. Maybe we are big fans of Ben Wade, Glenn Mickens, or Don Bessent, all who wore #46 for the Brooklyn Dodgers? An unbelievably creative guess (which we really have been asked), but no to that as well.

46brooklyn is named after Eric’s mom. She was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946. The motivation to leave everything he knew and start on this new journey came from losing her. Sadly, without her passing, there would be no 46brooklyn. Everything we have learned and shared since our launch would still be rotting away in CMS’ databases. So 46brooklyn seemed like an appropriate name at the time. It never crossed our minds that anyone would actually read our work, ask us about our name, or use our visualizations, so the fact that the name meant nothing to anyone outside of Eric and his family didn’t matter. The name was just a good reminder of why he was doing this in the first place, which became a broader metaphor for what motivates all of us at 46brooklyn: a better healthcare experience for our families.

So, if you are wondering what drives us – look no further than our name. This not about telling you that AWP, spread pricing, and rebates are the root of all problems we have with drug pricing (even though they pretty much are). Despite our background in pharmacy, it’s not about pharmacy either. All this dysfunction just happened to conveniently be lying in front of us at the exact time we were looking for something to fix. What this is about is finding the courage to jettison excuses and do something that means something. It’s about trying to right a wrong, no matter how improbable that may be.

Unfortunately, there are wrongs everywhere in this world, most which are way more serious than our drug pricing conundrum. When you are faced with such a sobering reminder of your own mortality, you start to see these things more clearly. We are surrounded by suffering and the causes for suffering. It doesn’t take much to help; just the intention to step off the hamster wheel that most of us are on, shed our excuses, and do something.

So, as we look forward into the future, we don’t have any bold projections for you. We’ll write some more stuff, uncover more drug pricing mysteries, and publish some more data visualizations. Hopefully it will enhance and advance the discourse. Some of our research and insights will be juicy and hard-hitting, while most of it will just be flat-out nerdy and largely ignored. We honestly can’t tell which is which until you all judge it for us.

But all of that doesn’t matter. What we can tell you is that so long that we carry the name 46brooklyn, we will just do the best we can to right the wrong that fell in our laps. It may never happen. But we are devoted to keep trying regardless of the outcome.

Here’s to all of us setting the intention now, and into the future, to right the wrongs that confront us – no matter how daunting they may seem.