Trade & Channel Strategies 2024: Navigating Industry Challenges

PC: What have been some of your goals in terms of what you wanted to accomplish here at Trade & Channel Strategies?

Hamrick: I always look at Trade & Channel as a nice capstone to the year. It's a great time to assess what's been accomplished in the year and get ready for the coming year, and also connect with a lot of great industry colleagues to find out what the hot issues are. Obviously, our goals were to do all those things, and I think the biggest thing that happens is we use this meeting as a springboard into next year by setting the stage for addressing a lot of those key issues that are discussed here at the meeting.

PC: Have there been any sessions in particular that have caught your eye?

Hamrick: There are two that stand out right now. First is the keynote session, which is speaking to the issues that the industry is facing across stakeholders in terms of the pressure from regulatory and the impact from the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s getting challenging now in terms of margin compression and regulatory issues that have to be dealt with in compliance. There’s also a number of headwinds ahead, primarily from a standpoint of more GenMed and what I would call tweener therapies. There’s still room to maneuver from the standpoint of specialty therapies and infuse therapies in the pipeline.

I would say that in general, the main context is how are we dealing with some of these and what structural changes do we need to make to be able to still be profitable, competitive, and grow in this more challenging environment. The other is just around data, obviously AI, and the impact of AI on everything we do is upon us. There was a great session on data and analytics that I just attended. Where do we apply AI, where do we start first when we're trying to enhance and create new structures for data governance and data management?