Access, Automation, and What Works in Pharmacy: Ryan Telford, PharmD

Innovations in pharmacy are already delivering results, but there is still work to do to evolve the ecosystem, said Ryan Telford, PharmD, vice president of health system pharmacy portfolio strategy at Cencora, at Asembia’s AXS26. In his role at Cencora, he works closely with health systems navigating the rapidly evolving pharmacy landscape, from technology adoption to specialty care delivery.

When asked about the most promising pharmacy innovations taking hold at scale, Telford affirmed the importance of technology but pushed back gently on the reflex to equate innovation with technology alone. He noted that the technology landscape is beginning to settle in meaningful ways, with tools emerging that improve patient access, affordability, and pharmacy workflow efficiency. Automation, in particular, he sees as a real and near-term opportunity: freeing pharmacists to work at the top of their license rather than being consumed by transactional tasks. His advice to health systems is to be intentional about partnerships and to prioritize vendors who can demonstrate concrete return on investment through proven use cases.

But it's the therapeutic side of innovation that drew his greatest enthusiasm.

"When we see cell and gene therapy start to hit the market in ways that we've been looking at for decades, the promise of personalized medicine, durable and curative therapies in diseases that have been challenging to treat for decades—that therapeutic promise is here," Telford said.

He described cancer treatments and rare disease therapies as having moved firmly from aspiration to reality, framing the current moment as one of the most exciting in modern medicine. The challenge now, he emphasized, is sustainability—ensuring the health care system can deliver these treatments in a way that's financially viable long-term. He described that challenge as "imminently solvable."

On the question of health systems building out their own specialty pharmacies and whether this trend threatens independent and community pharmacy roles, Telford centered his answer on patient access. He acknowledged that the closure of community pharmacies leaves real gaps in care that are critical to fill. Rather than framing health systems and independent pharmacies as competitors, he argued that all players are necessary.

"All of those players are needed in this ecosystem," he said, "and it should be centered on access to care for those patients."