Five Lessons Learned from Building Charter: A Purpose-Built Solution for Specialty Pharmacy Innovation
In healthcare technology, impact isn’t measured by lines of code or deployment speeds—it’s measured by how well a system removes barriers to care. Creating Charter, a proprietary pharmacy patient management system designed from the ground up, was not about replacing software. Our goal was to build a solution to address the distinct needs of specialty pharmacy programs. Charter improves how care is delivered through better managing patients and overall specialty pharmacy program development and has become an integrated and sustainable asset for specialty pharmacies within hospitals and health systems.
Our technology team delivered Charter, a critical corporate strategy, in less than a year. Here are five lessons our team learned along the way in building a new technology platform.
Lesson 1: Don't Underestimate the Need for a Solid Foundation
Charter is not a technology upgrade; it is a commitment to scale. From the beginning, we knew that decisions made in the early weeks of the build would determine our ability to grow, innovate and support client partners in the future. Our team had no intention of building for today and worrying about tomorrow later. We made intentional investments in the foundation that would pay off in speed, flexibility and sustainability down the road.
We architected a robust, cloud-native infrastructure using modern development tools and patterns. We started by treating infrastructure, security and configuration as code. This approach ensured that environments were repeatable, scalable and auditable.
Lesson 2: Align on "Why" Before Building "What"
Charter indirectly supports and serves patients and providers, not just workflows, and this capability didn’t emerge by accident, but from deliberate conversations and cross-functional alignment.
Through collaborative workshops, our operations, clinical and technology teams co-created a simple but powerful vision: build a platform that adapts to the evolving complexity in specialty pharmacy. This became our north star, guiding every sprint, feature and decision throughout the build. Today, Charter is used by specialty pharmacy teams across the country to better manage patient enrollment, medication accessibility and adherence, prioritize tasks and provide a real-time view to monitor patient prescriptions and fulfillment and track financial assistance needs.
Lesson 3: Process is the Product
At times, we were tempted to bypass workshops and user feedback loops in favor of moving faster. But we learned that patient-centered solutions aren't born from speed alone; they come from intentional, disciplined collaboration.
Charter's success isn’t just about technological agility -- it is about team agility. Every user story, sprint review and feedback loop grounded the work in real-world pharmacy challenges. The process helps us stay close to the people we are building for, shortening the distance between assumptions and reality.
Lesson 4: The Right People Change Everything
Too often in healthcare technology projects, teams are built in silos: the technology teams focus on the code; clinical teams focus on the workflows; and operations teams focus on the business process. These groups work in parallel, hand off requirements, or react to each other’s decisions late in the process, often resulting in systems that meet technical specifications, but fall short in usability, efficiency or real-world adoption.
Charter was built by a blended team from day one. Developers worked side by side with clinical and operational leaders, including a PharmD with deep specialty pharmacy experience. This ensured that clinical insights, operational realities and technical solutions were integrated in every decision, translating our vision into a working solution that meets the needs of patients, clinicians and health systems alike.
Lesson 5: Always Build for What Comes Next
Charter was built to accommodate future specialty pharmacy regulatory challenges, manufacturer restrictions, audits and compliance needs. Its modular architecture, cloud-native infrastructure and extensible design mean that the platform won’t just meet today's needs—it’s ready to accommodate new features, integrations and industry shifts for health systems for years to come. More importantly, it ensures we can continue to innovate without reinventing the foundation.
Extensible design is an approach our technology team used to intentionally build into the framework of their platforms to make room for future growth, changes or enhancements without needing to start from scratch. This type of forward compatibility approach allows for the easy integration of new features with minimal effort.
Charter is a reflection of the mission of a specialty pharmacy services company to build enduring infrastructure for hospitals and health systems. It’s proof that when technology, purpose and process align, we can improve operations and patient outcomes at the same time.
To learn more about Charter visit Our Technology page and visit our Connect with us page to contact Clearway Health about our specialty pharmacy patient management platform.