Three Takeaways From NASP inSPire 2026: Technology, Margins and the Pressure to Scale

Specialty pharmacies are navigating a difficult balance, including supporting growth, managing increasingly complex workflows and protecting margins while keeping patients moving toward therapy.

At NASP inSPire 2026, three themes stood out in conversations with Prochant’s team. Pharmacies are evaluating a growing number of technologies that handle individual intake tasks. They are looking for ways to improve revenue cycle efficiency under financial pressure, and their internal RCM teams are being asked to manage expansion and higher workloads.

Together, these observations point to a practical question for specialty pharmacy leaders: How can the organization turn growth and technology investment into stronger reimbursement performance?

1. More Intake Technology Creates a Greater Need for Connected Workflows

Specialty pharmacies have more options for automating individual parts of intake. Tools can support referral processing, benefits investigation, prior authorization and other tasks that require significant administrative effort. The challenge our team heard at NASP was how to make those solutions work together.

A tool may speed up one task while leaving staff responsible for transferring information, reconciling records or managing the next step manually. When several systems support the same patient journey, teams need clear visibility into what has been completed, what remains unresolved and who owns the next action.

For specialty pharmacy leaders, technology evaluation should extend beyond the task a product performs. It should also examine how that task connects to the rest of the revenue cycle.

Information captured during intake needs to flow accurately into billing, with unresolved authorization issues visible early enough for teams to address them before they delay reimbursement. Automation should reduce the total administrative workload across the revenue cycle, including duplicate entry, manual handoffs and downstream corrections.

Following a referral through billing and payment can help reveal where technology is creating value and where manual work still fills the gaps.

2. Margin Pressure Makes RCM Efficiency a Business Priority

Protecting margins was another recurring theme in our team’s conversations. For specialty pharmacies, revenue cycle efficiency affects the resources required to secure payment. Repeated corrections, unresolved balances and manual follow-up consume staff time while delaying cash.

Improving efficiency starts with tracing recurring problems to their source, whether missing intake information is creating billing backlogs, workflow gaps are driving repeat denials or payment discrepancies reveal differences between expected reimbursement and actual collections.

Leaders should look at both financial results and the effort behind them. Useful measures include:

• Time from service or dispensing to billing
• Claim rejection and denial trends
• Days sales outstanding and A/R aging
• Expected reimbursement compared with actual payment
• Staff time spent on corrections and repeat follow-up

Reviewing these measures together helps teams identify the causes of inefficiency and prioritize changes that can improve cash flow. The goal is to reduce avoidable work throughout the revenue cycle so staff can spend more time resolving the accounts that require their expertise.

3. Expansion Is Increasing Pressure on Internal RCM Teams

Growth creates opportunity, but it also increases the volume of work required to capture and collect revenue.

Our team heard concerns about internal RCM teams managing expansion alongside their existing responsibilities. More referrals, therapies and business activity can increase the demand for verification, billing and payment follow-up. Teams also need capacity to handle exceptions, investigate discrepancies and prevent recurring problems.

When workloads grow faster than operational capacity, staff may spend more time reacting to queues and less time improving the processes behind them.

Specialty pharmacy leaders can prepare by assessing capacity across the full revenue cycle, identifying where work is accumulating, which tasks require specialized expertise and where automation can reduce routine workloads, while establishing clear ownership as accounts move between teams.

A sustainable growth plan needs clear workflows, appropriate staffing and performance visibility that allows leaders to address pressure before it becomes a persistent backlog.

What These Takeaways Mean for Specialty Pharmacy Leaders

The three themes Prochant heard at NASP are closely connected.

Fragmented technology can leave manual work between systems. That work increases the effort required to collect revenue. Expansion then adds volume to processes already under pressure. Addressing those challenges requires visibility from intake through final payment, with clear accountability for each step.

Prochant supports specialty pharmacies with end-to-end revenue cycle management, combining specialized industry expertise and disciplined processes across intake, billing and collections. Our proprietary, AI-driven technology, Prochant Pulse™, supports workflow management, helping teams coordinate tasks, manage growing workloads and maintain clear accountability across the revenue cycle.

As specialty pharmacies plan their next stage of growth, the NASP conversations offer a useful starting point: examine how technology, people and processes work together to support accurate reimbursement and predictable cash flow.