Jeff Malone has built his career around a question that is deceptively simple: can healthcare work better for the people who depend on it? For the President and CEO of RxPreferred, the answer has never been to accept the established model simply because it has become familiar. His career in pharmacy and healthcare has been shaped by a willingness to challenge assumptions, examine where incentives sit, and build alternatives that give employers, health systems, and patients greater clarity over the decisions affecting prescription drug costs.

Malone’s path into leadership began in the operational side of pharmacy. Before establishing RxPreferred, he was a co-owner of Net-Rx, where he worked with independent pharmacies on operational and reconciliation services. That experience brought him close to the practical realities of pharmacy economics and to the frustrations independent pharmacy owners faced with conventional pharmacy benefit managers. In 2011, he joined a group of independent pharmacy owners to create RxPreferred, building the company around a transparent model that rejected spread pricing and sought to align the organization’s interests with those of its clients and the communities they serve.

Malone earned his education at Western Kentucky University and went on to build an entrepreneurial career largely focused on healthcare, pharmacy, and business strategy. But his professional identity is better understood through what he has chosen to build than through titles or credentials. From the beginning, his interest has been in creating a company where independence is an advantage rather than a limitation.

Career and the Success of RxPreferred

Under the leadership of Malone, RxPreferred today operates as a pharmacy benefits, 340B, and pharmaceutical rebates administrator as well as a healthcare technology company. Its model provides 100 percent pass-through of rebates and network discounts, avoids spread pricing, and does not rely on pharmacy ownership or vertical integration. The company says its zero-conflict strategy is embedded in its bylaws, allowing it to approach benefit decisions without the competing financial interests that can accompany ownership across multiple parts of the pharmacy ecosystem. For Malone, transparency is not simply about opening a financial report after a transaction has taken place. It is about giving the people responsible for healthcare spending enough information to understand what is happening and why. “If an employer doesn’t have the ability to see exactly what the PBM is paying the pharmacy on their behalf, they have absolutely no way of knowing whether they’ve been overcharged,” Malone has said.

That conviction has remained remarkably consistent even as RxPreferred has grown. In 2026, RxPreferred marked its 15th anniversary, a significant milestone, with the organization describing its journey as one built on transparency, innovation, and measurable results. It has also reported 436 percent revenue growth between 2021 and 2024, demonstrating that Malone’s decision to build around an independent model has not prevented commercial growth.

Yet growth itself is not Malone’s primary ambition. His vision is considerably broader, to change how pharmacy benefits are understood, managed, and optimized. The healthcare technology emerging from RxPreferred reflects that objective. Rather than treating data as something that explains what happened months after a pharmacy transaction, Malone wants it to become a decision-making resource that can identify problems as they happen. That vision is embodied in RxP-AI, the company’s AI-powered platform. Introduced to provide real-time insights, predictive modeling, and cost-savings analytics, the platform is intended to help employers and healthcare organizations identify opportunities before pharmacy costs become entrenched. Malone describes the underlying principle succinctly: “Pharmacy benefits management should be proactive, not reactive.”

For Malone, however, technology and cost containment cannot be separated from the human consequences of pharmacy decisions. A lower number on a plan’s annual spending report means little if the patient cannot obtain the medication they need. Likewise, a benefit structure that looks attractive to an employer but lacks clarity for its members is incomplete. His leadership style reflects this wider responsibility. Malone believes sustainable growth requires integrity, talented people, open debate, and a willingness to remain committed to a purpose even when the easier commercial decision may lie elsewhere. He has repeatedly resisted the idea that RxPreferred should expand simply to become larger. The company instead seeks to build capabilities that create lasting value for the people and organizations it serves.

The future Malone sees for RxPreferred is therefore not a departure from its beginnings. It is a deeper expression of them. The company intends to strengthen artificial intelligence, clinical capabilities, analytics, 340B administration, and rebate solutions while developing new ways to help organizations manage pharmacy spending proactively. Its future rests on the belief that better information should lead to better decisions, and better decisions should ultimately lead to better outcomes.

There is also a larger principle behind Malone’s ambitions. He believes the healthcare marketplace does not need another organization asking clients to accept opaque systems because they have always existed. It needs companies willing to challenge how the system works, question where incentives sit and give decision-makers the freedom to act on what they learn. That is the company Jeff Malone continues to build.

His passion is not simply pharmacy, technology, or entrepreneurship in isolation. It is the intersection of all three—the possibility of taking a complicated healthcare system, making its economics easier to understand, applying technology intelligently, and creating a business where doing the right thing can also be good business.  In fact, Malone’s own advice to emerging leaders captures the principle behind that journey: “Stay anchored to your purpose. Markets will change, technologies will advance, and healthcare models will continue to be challenged. The values guiding the organization should not have to change with them.”