inSPire 2026 Rewind; The Hub of Specialty Pharmacy | Part One

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

A special thank you to our sponsors for this year's coverage of Inspire 2026 Your support makes our coverage possible. And now, a quick message before this episode begins.

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SPEAKER_2 (1:45)

You are listening to the global network of podcasters dedicated to the pharmacy profession. Welcome to the Pharmacy Podcast Network.

SPEAKER_3 (2:07)

It's that time of year where the Pharmacy Podcast Network's founder and CEO, Todd Eury, lands where the hub of Specialty Pharmacy hosts their annual meeting.

Introducing the Inspire 2026 Annual Expo. That's right, Specialty Pharmacy is evolving, and so is the name of its largest annual meeting. The NASP Annual Meeting and Expo got an upgrade. Innovation, networking, specialty pharmacy expertise, insights, research and education come together to empower, educate and connect our community. Live in National Harbor, Maryland, tune in as Todd roams the showroom floor, bringing you the inside coverage of this year's event.

Todd Eury (2:52)

Dr. Stephen Miller here from First Databank. I have been looking forward to this interview with you, Stephen, introduce yourself and what you do and your unique role at FDB.

Stephen Miller (3:04)

So I'm Steve Miller. Thanks a lot, Todd, for having me on. So I'm a pediatric gastroenterologist. I got into this whole pharmacy informatics space initially because I as a pediatric GI doctor was essentially functioning as a specialty pharmacy prior orthologist. That was my whole life, was trying to get patients access to these life-saving medications, mostly kids with inflammatory bowel disease. I'm an informatician, and I got real obsessed with health care human factors and the workflows in specialty pharmacy. That eventually took me to working with First Databank, this amazing health IT company. I think what I'm looking at in terms of future state in pharmacy and in specialty pharmacy, is ways in which we're seeing that AI, and particularly, agentic AI, is going to really heavily impact pharmacy workflows. In terms of what's happening right now with AI, the main actually real-world used use cases, ambient listening, and billing and coding of diagnoses and CPT codes in treatments. It's heavily impacting doctor workflows in that way. And I think there's this great promise in pharmacy, but I don't know that it's really all been realized quite yet. But I think very proximally there's a bunch of ways that agentic AI in general is going to have major impacts on actual pharmacy workflows.

And I think my company, FDB, is going to be involved in some of these, but not necessarily all of them.

And I want to talk about a few of them.

SPEAKER_6 (5:12)

Is that a reasonable?

Todd Eury (5:13)

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_6 (5:14)

We want to hear about them.

Stephen Miller (5:15)

And I think there's other vendors here who are doing some of this stuff. But when you think about the sort of pharmacy ordering drug life cycle, a doctor, I guess, is the initiator. A patient comes in, they're the initiator, they're sick. Then the doctor or some kind of clinician, sometimes a pharmacist, PA, whatever, places an order. And then there's this whole orchestrated stream of downstream events that happen that screw up the process and would have been great for the doctor to know initially.

Prior auth issues, errors in the writing of prescriptions, the right drug in terms of institutional policy, payer policy, clinically correct drug, and then information about cost and patient specific counseling. It would be great if a lot of this stuff could happen much more proximally in the workflow. And there's a, you know, things like this have happened, real time prescription benefits. There's a lot of different tools in the market that accomplish this. But I think what we're going to see is less talk and more action in this area.