How Stakeholders Can Avert 340B Rebate Disruption

In the third and final installment of Pharmaceutical Commerce’s video interview with Valerie Bandy, PharmD, vice president of Pharmacy Solutions at Tecsys, the discussion turns to where 340B rebate mechanics are most likely to disrupt purchasing workflows, and what stakeholders can do about it.

Bandy frames the pharmacy supply chain as a single connected system rather than a set of discrete steps. Purchasing decisions made at procurement, including supplier and contract selection, ripple into inventory and dispensing, where incomplete visibility into product location and usage can obscure compliance issues until after a transaction has already closed. That gap, she says, forces pharmacy teams into reactive cycles of investigation and correction just to stay in compliance.

Bandy points to a shift toward more proactive tools, citing Tecsys IQ, the company's AI platform, and its 340B Integrity agent, which is designed to flag compliance risk, such as a GPO-prohibited purchase, before it happens rather than after. That approach, she says, marks a broader shift in the industry away from reacting to problems and toward catching them earlier. She argues that treating 340B compliance as an isolated financial or administrative function, rather than as one piece of the broader supply chain, is part of what leaves organizations exposed to fragmented inventory data, drug shortages and waste.

On avoiding disruption, Bandy lays out distinct roles for each stakeholder: manufacturers need to communicate rebate and program requirements clearly enough for health systems to plan around them; health systems need centralized ownership and governance of their 340B programs rather than responsibility scattered across departments; and technology providers need to keep simplifying the purchasing, inventory and financial workflows underneath it all. The throughline across all three, she says, is freeing pharmacy staff to catch risk before it becomes disruption, so the focus can stay on patient care rather than damage control.

Watch the previous installments of Bandy’s interview with PC:

1. What 340B Rebate Tracking Really Demands From Pharmacies
2. How Rebate Timing Distorts a Pharmacy's 340B Books