PayerAlly
Pharmacy Benefit Consulting Without Conflicts
Our Mission
PayerAlly's mission is to deliver tailored pharmacy consulting solutions covering the areas of vendor management, contracting, and oversight. We provide superior decision-making support, insightful and actionable modeling and analytics, clinical oversight, and pharmacy strategy.
Our Leadership
Will McHugh
President and Co-founder
Will McHugh is the President and Co-founder of PayerAlly, an independent pharmacy consulting firm. The firm was founded to improve the positions of employers, union groups, and health plans when contracting for PBM services. He is an active member of the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) and regularly speaks on industry topics covering value-based contracting, PBM pricing, and the broader industry landscape.
Will has more than 21 years of experience within the PBM and pharmacy supply chain industry covering the areas of finance, account management, operations, marketing, and business development. Most Recently, Will served for 10 years as Senior Vice President for Solid Benefit Guidance (SBG)/Gallagher Benefit Services. For the past several years, Will managed the pharmacy practice's health plan segment, working with multiple larger Payers to help them negotiate their PBM agreements, improve the competitiveness of their pharmacy programs, and worked with internal staff to maximize the value of their pharmacy vertical.
Will began his career at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey working in their Healthcare Practice Group before moving on to take positions at WebMD Envoy helping them build and establish new relationships with midmarket PBMs before taking business development roles at PerformRx and Catalyst Rx. Will received a Bachelor of Arts from Florida State University.
Bill Guerci, CPA
Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder
Bill Guerci is the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of PayerAlly, an independent pharmacy consulting firm. The firm was founded to improve the positions of employers, union groups, and health plans when purchasing, or and contracting for, PBM services. Bill has over 35 years’ experience and an extensive background in financial/business aspects of health care including consulting to large Payers, Health Plan/PBM oversight and product strategy/management.
Most recently, Bill was the CFO of EmpiRx Healthcare, a pharmacy benefit manager administering pharmacy benefits for over 300,000 members. Bill established a financial strategy and discipline for the company that resulted in improved profitability and service to clients.
Bill co-founded and managed Solid Benefit Guidance, a pharmacy and medical consulting company which was subsequently merged into Arthur J Gallagher. Bill’s accomplishments include helping guide the growth of the company utilizing his insider expertise to support clients in reducing their pharmacy and healthcare expenditures. He managed a team that provided a superior client service experience resulting in a customer retention in excess of 98%. He built a world class team of professionals to support the client base. Within the SBG PBM vertical, he supported the management of the practice to attain a status as a top tier PBM consulting practice servicing both health plans and large employers.
Bill trained for the first 7 years of his career at Price Waterhouse where he was an auditor with clients including technology, advertising and healthcare.
After Price Waterhouse, Bill held senior financial positions in the managed care industry including Chief Financial Officer for Group Health Incorporated, Vice President of Empire’s Medicare HMO division and National Accounts at Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Chief Financial Officer at NYLCare Health Plans. Bill’s unique combination of financial expertise, knowledge of the health care system and creative thinking has been a benefit to these firms.
Bill received his Bachelor of Science in accounting from Manhattan College. He is a Certified Public Accountant and a member of both the AICPA and NY State Society of Accountants. Bill has previously served as a Trustee on the Nyack Hospital Board and a board member of CP of NYS. He is currently a board member of Independence Care Systems.
Kerri Tanner, PharmD RPh
Chief Pharmacy Officer
Dr. Kerri Tanner is the Chief Pharmacy Officer of PayerAlly, an independent consulting firm. The firm was founded to improve the positions of employers, union groups, and health plans when contracting PBM services. She is a licensed pharmacist with a long history of health plan, PBM, and specialty experience in the medication management space.
Kerri was previously the Senior Vice President of Specialty Product for Optum, and previously acquired Catamaran, and spent almost 10 years at the organization driving success for the clients through varied roles in network management, audit, specialty and infusion pharmacy, compliance and product. She is known as an innovation leader in the management of medications covered on both the pharmacy and medical benefit.
In addition to her 10 years in pharmacy benefits management for Optum, she was also with CVSHealth (Caremark) for another 10 years. She also has 10 years of retail pharmacy practice experience, including chain and independent pharmacies and was the pharmacy operations director within a health plan focusing on their plan as a Medicare Part D plan sponsor.
Kerri earned her Bachelor of Science in Molecular and Cellular Biology and her Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) both from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.
JT (Jeniene) Bernardini
Vice President of Underwriting
JT (Jeniene) Bernardini, Vice President of Underwriting for PayerAlly, has 20 years of experience in PBM financial management, underwriting and data analytics. Over the course of her career, JT has worked on some of the most significant PBM and Specialty pharmacy procurements in the industry, providing clients with pricing and trend modeling, detailed pharmacy data analytics, and contract evaluation and oversight.
She has held underwriting positions at Eckerd Health Services, NMHC, CatalystRx, and Catamaran modeling deals for health plans, unions, larger employer groups, and pharmacy coalitions around the nation. Prior to joining PayerAlly, JT was the Area Vice President of Health Plan Pricing and Data Analytics at Gallagher Benefit Services.
JT earned a BS in Finance and International Business from Penn State University.
Hannah Vu
Vice President, Audit Division
Hannah Vu has 21 years of experience in the pharmacy industry with a focus in data analytics. Hannah has extensive experience and a comprehensive background in PBM auditing including financial and rebate guarantees, benefit design, clinical utilization management, and the review of manufacturer rebates for all lines of business.
Prior to joining PayerAlly, Hannah was a Senior Pharmacy Auditor at Arthur J. Gallagher where she worked on PBM audits for large health plans with multiple lines of business and employer groups, which included coalitions, to ensure PBM contract compliance. Hannah was a preeminent auditor and helped clients identify PBM errors including substantial shortfalls in both discount and rebate guarantees. She has experience working with different PBMs and interpreting the various contract language to identify variances between the Agreement and actual performance. Hannah was also a Senior Pharmacy Auditor at Pharmaceutical Strategies Group prior to Gallagher.
Hannah served as a Manager of Pharmacy Programs prior to Pharmaceutical Strategies Group, for Christus Health, where she was responsible for implementing and managing all pharmacy benefits and programs for their Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, Tricare, and Exchange Plans. She was also responsible for end-to-end strategy deployment and monitoring and management of the PBMs. She helped with the identification of gaps and solutions to ensure that the pharmacy programs were administered in accordance with regulatory requirements. During her time with Christus Health, she was involved in regulatory audits as well as delegation audits. Prior to Christus, Hannah held positions at SonexusHealth and Emdeon.
Hannah earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree with a focus in Finance from Texas Woman's University.