As 2025 comes to a close, we sat down with Hemal Desai, former President of BestRx, now SVP of Community Pharmacy at RedSail Technologies to discuss this year's wins, challenges, and the exciting year to come.
Q: What BestRx accomplishments are you most proud of this year?
A: We got a lot done in 2025. The first one that comes to mind is officially launching the Forms & Schedulers functionality. In addition, I would say making overall improvements to the BestRx cloud-hosted solution. We made a lot of smaller upgrades this year that might not be the most flashy—but were beneficial for our customers.
I am also thrilled about being able to provide RedSail Pay to BestRx users. Merchant processing rates have historically been a big expense for pharmacies and a pain point for customers that we couldn’t do much about. Now, we have an in-house solution that can make merchant services much cheaper for pharmacies. I know it was just rolled out to our customers, but once people see how well it works and the very real savings...it’s going to be so exciting.
Q: Is there a particular challenge BestRx overcame this year that you can share with us?
A: Sure, yeah. I would say upgrading our e-prescribing platform to make it more efficient for our high-volume clients. We had some customers who were getting thousands of prescriptions a day, which was ultimately slowing down our system. This year, we were able to improve the solution so that it grows with the customer, no matter the number of transcriptions. We’ve been on the forefront of e-prescribing solutions, and actually just this year we were one of the first to be certified in electronic prescription transfer through Surescripts. We have had the ability to e-transfer prescriptions internally between BestRx locations for a few years, but now our clients can e-transfer to any pharmacy that is also certified on the Surescript network, which includes both chains and independents In addition to our e-prescribing enhancements, we also built automations into BestRx to make the workflow quicker and continue to streamline redundant tasks.
Q: Well, that’s awesome news. Shifting a little bit here, you moved into a new role this fall, SVP of Community Pharmacy at RedSail Technologies. Talk to us a little about what that means for you and BestRx.
A: Absolutely. I want people to know I’m still very involved in BestRx, just not in every single facet like I was previously. For example, I’m no longer managing the Sales and Marketing teams. We have talented people who are fully focused on those functions which has freed me up to also take on PioneerRx and QS/1.
With this new role, I oversee the RedSail community pharmacy products. It just gives us more insight into the way other platforms run. Rather than learning it on our own, we can lean on the other teams within RedSail and all work together. There are certain things we’ve [BestRx] wanted to do that PioneerRx has already figured out, and vice versa. And now with new initiatives, we’re not working within silos; we can come together and develop a solution that works across the board. So ultimately, it’s a win-win-win for BestRx, RedSail, and our network of users.
Q: How will BestRx continue to differentiate itself in a competitive market?
A: One of the things we’ve always done well is listen to customers, and we will continue to do so. For example, we received feedback this year that customers want more focus on our core products versus integrations and ancillary services; so that impacted our roadmap and overall plans for 2026. Plus, with our U.S.-based service team, we get almost instant feedback that enable us to react quickly. We don’t have long lifecycles for development, and we’re able to react to regulatory changes very quickly. We’ve remained nimble AND kept prices low because we’ve joined the RedSail organization. Now that our network is so much larger, we’re able to achieve efficiencies elsewhere, so that we don’t have to raise our prices.
Q: You mentioned the 2026 BestRx roadmap. Can you give us a sneak peek into what we can expect next year?
A: Absolutely! I would say three of our top priorities are straight from customer feedback, and they are:
Q: Awesome. This is my last question. How do you see BestRx contributing to the growth of independent pharmacy under the RedSail umbrella?
A: We’re going to continue to bring opportunities to community pharmacies that were unavailable to us as a smaller, individual network. When we were acquired, BestRx’s network was ~1500 pharmacies and, while we’re now approaching 1700, that’s still not big enough to get the attention of clinical and pharma players. Now, with a larger network, we can use our muscle to work with these big industry folks to get paid for things you’re already doing. Like with the new, free Clinical+ tool, pharmacists were already speaking to patients about lapsed medications and vaccination opportunities, but now our pharmacies can get paid for doing their job.
BestRx remains committed to ongoing innovation and customer-driven improvements. Cheers to a productive 2025 and a wonderful 2026!