AI Amplified Podcast with Heather Bassett

From Mathematics to Medication Costs

Host of AI Amplified, Dr. Heather Bassett, interviewed Miriam Paramore, Founder and CEO of RxUtility. The conversation opened with a shared thread: both Heather and Miriam came up through mathematics and computer science, and Miriam traced her path back to her time at Belmont University as the starting point for a career at the intersection of technology and healthcare. That foundation ultimately led her to launch RxUtility in 2024 with a clear consumer problem in mind — medication costs are confusing, fragmented, and often unknown until a patient is standing at the pharmacy counter. Between copay coupons, cash prices, and a tangle of affordability tools across different channels, patients rarely have what they need to make an informed decision. RxUtility was built to change that.

The Complexity Behind a Simple Question: “What Will This Cost Me?”

Miriam and Heather dug into why prescription pricing is so opaque, and how that opacity creates real harm for patients. Even when pricing options exist, they’re scattered across systems that don’t talk to each other — leaving providers, pharmacists, and patients without a unified picture. Miriam explained how RxUtility’s platform, Mimi™, addresses this by functioning as a utility layer that integrates with existing healthcare workflows rather than asking clinicians to adopt yet another standalone tool. Mimi offers two paths: embedding pricing data directly into systems already in use through AI connectivity, or providing a private-labeled solution for practices that want a more customized experience. Either way, the goal is the same — put accurate, comparable medication cost information in front of the right person at the right moment.

Building AI-First and Building Lean

The conversation turned to how Miriam built RxUtility itself, and her answer was as much about operating philosophy as it was about technology. She constructed the company with a small team, deliberately leaning on AI tools — including Anthropic’s Claude — to handle functions that would traditionally require dedicated legal, financial, and operational roles. It’s a real-world proof of concept for the kind of efficiency AI advocates often describe in the abstract. The recent launch of Mimi as a generative conversational AI orchestrator brought its own set of challenges: managing prescription pricing data across 20,000 drugs and 60,000 pharmacies at the agentic level is not a solved problem, and Miriam was candid about what it takes to develop and maintain systems at that scale. Heather and Miriam closed with a note of genuine enthusiasm about where AI in healthcare is headed — particularly its potential to free up providers to focus on the human connection that no technology can replace.

Miriam Paramore on LinkedIn

RxUtility on LinkedIn

RxUtility website

Host
Heather Bassett, MD
Chief Medical Officer
Xsolis

Dr. Heather Bassett continues to drive AI innovation in healthcare to address operational challenges for health systems and plans, guiding them toward positive operational and patient outcomes. Rare among Chief Medical Officers at healthcare technology companies, she leads both the clinical services and data science teams. She architected Xsolis’ Care Level Score™, which integrates clinical expertise and data science to provide a numerical representation of the appropriate care status for each patient. This score and Xsolis’ AI-driven platform, Dragonfly, are uniting payers and providers during concurrent authorization processes to improve utilization management, patient outcomes, and reduce costs. Dragonfly is in use at hundreds of hospitals, health systems and health plans across America.

Dr. Bassett is passionate about advancing responsible AI in healthcare and is actively leading Xsolis’ involvement with the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), an organization advancing the responsible development, deployment, and oversight of AI in healthcare, which Xsolis joined as an Early Member. Dr. Bassett was recognized by Nashville Business Journal’s Health Care Innovation Awards as Chief Medical Officer of the Year 2021 and by Becker’s Hospital Review’s Women in Health IT to Know 2023-2025. She has contributed articles or been featured in Newsweek, Forbes, AARP Magazine, InformationWeek, Becker’s, Fierce Healthcare, Medical Economics, MedCity News, Physicians Practice, and Patient Safety Quality Healthcare.

She earned a B.S. in biological sciences from Carnegie Mellon University and her Doctor of Medicine from the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas, where she worked as a research associate in the field of DNA repair. She undertook her residency in internal medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and worked as a hospitalist at Centennial Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., for eight years. She is board-certified in internal medicine.

Guest
Miriam Paramore,
Founder and CEO
RxUtility

Miriam Paramore is founder and CEO of RxUtility. She is also an operating advisor at Goldman Sachs, a limited partner at 7wire, an angel investor and board member dedicated to improving the U.S. healthcare system through information.

Previously, Paramore served as President of OptimizeRx (NASDAQ:OPRX) and EVP of strategy at Emdeon.  

Paramore is passionate about making medications affordable for consumers. The company she founded, RxUtility, is the only platform connecting health systems, payers, pharmacists and digital health partners at the point of prescribing and pick up with real-time manufacturer copay assistance. By embedding prescription cost transparency in provider and pharmacy workflows, RxUtility offers patients clearer cost options, drives medication adherence and satisfaction scores, and ensures equitable access to prescription drugs.