Amy Wadstrom, RPh, on GPOs and transparency | PBMI 2026

At the 2026 Pharmacy Benefit Management Institute Annual National Conference in Orlando, Florida, Amy Wadstrom, RPh, president of Vivid Clear Rx, said that the transparency push in the pharmacy benefit industry is headed toward the group purchasing organizations despite some tactics to slow it down.

“I think there has been a lot of time spent maybe trying to figure out different definitions so maybe they don’t apply [to GPOs] — trying to play the games,” Wadstrom said in an interview Managed Healthcare Executive (MHE) after participating in the conference’s opening panel discussion yesterday morning titled “Redefining the Future of Pharmacy Care.”

Wadstrom said in the MHE interview the more important question for a PBM is not whether a GPO meets a minimum transparency bar, but whether the GPO goals are actually aligned with the PBM’s.

“The important part is finding the GPO partner that has your same goals and is aligned with where you want to go," she said. She pointed to Vivid Clear Rx's partnership with Expion Health as an example, saying the two organizations are fully aligned and that the relationship has opened access to multiple GPOs at once, giving Vivid Clear Rx more flexibility than a single-GPO arrangement would.

That flexibility, Wadstrom said, lets Vivid Clear Rx pass along rebates to clients at the individual drug level rather than as a single aggregated rebate figure across a plan. She described that level of detail as a meaningfully different tier of transparency from what clients typically get and said it has been an important driver of the company's success with clients.

Other members of the panel that Wadstrom participated in and moderated were Kathryn Carey, MBA, president of PBM at Optum; Dana McCormick, RPh, vice president of practice innovation at the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy; Krista Siano, vice president of business transformation at PSG; and Patty Starr, president and CEO of the Health Action Council.