Why The Austin Project exists
Reducing insulin waste and improving access to life-saving medication.
Mission
To reduce insulin waste and improve access to life-saving medication by developing safe, equitable, and evidence-based systems that help patients obtain prescribed insulin and prevent eligible unopened insulin from being needlessly destroyed.
Vision
A healthcare system in which no patient is denied prescribed insulin because of financial hardship and no safe, usable insulin is unnecessarily discarded.
The problem
Insulin is a life-saving medication, yet two problems persist side by side:
- Some patients cannot afford their prescribed insulin because they are uninsured, underinsured, between coverage, or facing a financial emergency.
- At the same time, safe, completely unopened insulin is routinely destroyed when treatment changes or ends, because today there is no regulated way to verify its storage history and return it to use.
The Austin Project believes both problems deserve serious, evidence-based solutions: an affordability program that helps patients today, and a regulated recovery framework that changes the system for tomorrow.
Our principles
- Financial and medical need should determine assistance.
- Clinical decisions remain entirely with prescribers and pharmacists.
- Safety and regulatory compliance come before speed.
- Funding partners must never influence prescribing.
- Focused outreach to underserved communities, applied equitably.
- Transparency about what the project is, and is not yet.