Surescripts Throws Down the Gauntlet in Amazon PillPack Spat

Happy Monday, readers! I hope you had a wonderful weekend.

There’s a veritable battle of the titans afoot in the pharmacy space. And it’s pitting Surescripts, a health IT and information network, against a startup called ReMy Health and tech giant Amazon’s online pharmacy service PillPack.

Shares of legacy pharmacy chains such as CVS and Walgreens sunk when Amazon announced its pickup of PillPack last June, sending shockwaves across an industry that’s been wary of the tech giant’s forays into the health care space for a while now.

Now, Surescripts says it’s prepared to hand over a dispute involving a third party startup called ReMy Health and PillPack over to the FBI.

“Specifically, we have suspended ReMy Health from our network, are terminating their contract, and are turning the matter over to the FBI for further investigation,” said Surescripts CEO Tom Skelton in an emailed statement to reporters.

So, what’s going on here? CNBC’s Chrissy Farr had the first report on this growing brouhaha a few weeks ago. Put simply, Surescripts claims that ReMy Health had been providing disingenuous information in order to acquire prescription drug histories available on Surescripts’ network and then giving it to one or more of its customers (aka, PillPack).

This kind of data is critical, especially for a company like Amazon that’s fairly new to the prescription delivery business. Now, Surescripts—which, critically, is backed by massive legacy firms such as CVS and the benefits giant Express Scripts, which aren’t exactly fans of Amazon elbowing in to their territory—has cut off both ReMy Health and, by extension, PillPack. (PillPack had already threatened to sue Surescripts over being cut off from access to this patient information; Surescripts is now clearly hitting back.)

PillPack takes exception to the allegations. “Our requests for patient information are made with the explicit consent of our customers and all information we provide is accurate. Any suggestion otherwise is false,” said PillPack spokesperson Jacquelyn Miller in an emailed statement. “Given that Surescripts is, to our knowledge, the sole clearinghouse for medication history in the United States, the core question is whether Surescripts will allow customers to share their medication history with pharmacies and if not, why not?”

The battle for digital pharmacy dominance is clearly heating up.

Read on for the day’s news.

Sy Mukherjee, @the_sy_guy, sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com

INDICATIONS

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THE BIG PICTURE

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