You shouldn't need to be a healthcare insider to get a fair price.

A patient stands at the pharmacy counter, confused about a price. Three rooms away, a hospital system, a pharmacy benefit manager and a billing team all know more about that price than the patient does. I've watched that scene play out for twenty years, from every side of the counter.

I'm Ryan Russell, and I've spent more than two decades inside the systems most patients never see. I started at Cerner, working in ambulatory, technical support and Millennium development, and later helped VA hospitals across the Pacific Northwest move onto Cerner. I've built blood bank and biotherapies integrations at WellSky, led oncology implementation and QA for the VA at DSS, supported pharmacy systems at ScriptPro, worked on VA and DoD care systems for veterans and military families, and served as a senior consultant at Nordic helping health systems through EHR transitions.

All of that taught me one thing: the information patients need to pay a fair price almost always exists. It's just never built for them. Real, legal savings sit unclaimed year after year, and now the other side is using AI to deny claims and hold on to that money faster than ever.

So I built Arik to fight back the same way. Not a coupon site, and not another company taking a cut from a PBM or a drug maker. Just a tool built by someone who knows how these systems work from the inside, pointed entirely at getting that money back into patients' hands. I run Arik out of Kansas City through RPR Development, the company I founded to build health tech that puts patients first.

Excerpt · Where Arik is going

Why Arik will become a health tech co-op

Here's the part I care about most: I want Arik to be owned by the people who do the work.

The companies we're up against answer to shareholders first. That's how you end up with an AI that gets rewarded for saying no. If Arik is owned by its own members, there's no buyer down the road who can turn it against the patients it was built to protect. The only people it will ever answer to are the people it serves and the people who build it.

Ownership is also how I want to build the team. The billing advocates, developers and security people who make Arik work should share in what it earns, not just collect a paycheck. That's how a small company brings in people who could make more somewhere else, and keeps them.

Cooperatives have worked for farmers and cheesemakers for generations. You don't see them much in tech, and I think healthcare is exactly where the model belongs. Long term, I want this to be an umbrella other health tech builders can grow under too: more tools for patients, owned by the people who make them.

Here's how we get there honestly. Arik starts as a regular company so we can raise money and ship fast. Once the team is big enough, we convert, and the co-op holds the majority. Early investors keep a minority stake, and I keep a small one, not much more than any other member. That's the deal I'd want if I were joining.