Sharon Faust, Pharm.D., MBA | PBMI Innovator

Sharon Faust, Pharm.D., MBA

Sara Bauer, one of the linemates on the 2006 University of Wisconsin team that won the national title, was named the nation’s top women’s college ice hockey player that season. Another linemate, Meghan Duggan, went on to become a top player for national and Olympic teams. Sharon Faust, Pharm.D., MBA, who was captain of that championship team, says her strength as the left wing was fighting for the puck in the corners of the rink and getting assists.

“I would joke about, I’m just here to assist,” says Faust with an easy laugh.

Faust, as the chief pharmacy officer of Navitus Health Solutions, a Madison, Wisconsin, pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), does much more than just assist. But she says her leadership style emphasizes the team, and the through line to her hockey-playing days is clear.

“My personal style is just to understand what’s going on but then also to understand the team, the strengths of the team and how we utilize the entire team to make even greater impacts,” she explains.

Managed Healthcare Executive and the Pharmacy Benefit Management Institute (PBMI) have selected Faust as a PBMI Innovator in the inaugural year of a recognition program to identify leaders in the U.S. PBM industry. She is new to the industry, moving into the leadership position at Navitus in September 2024, but it was a short path from her senior vice president position at Lumicera Health Services, a specialty pharmacy and a wholly owned subsidiary of Navitus. Faust was employee number 2 at Lumicera and helped it grow from two employees to 300 and from zero to $2 billion in annual drug purchases. Both Lumicera and Navitus have transparency and cost savings as their calling cards.

“Lumicera was started as a transparent, cost-plus specialty pharmacy,” says Faust. “From the very beginning, it was, ‘How do we pass the savings on to our plan sponsors?’” She says that after Navitus acquired Lumicera in 2021, it kept the cost-plus model and the dealings limpid. “If the Navitus plan sponsors want to opt into a cost-plus specialty model like Lumicera, they can do that, and then we would really have it be auditable. Within that contract, it’s auditable down to the purchase order, and that purchase order, or that price, is then used to dispense the product. So it’s very, very granular cost-plus,” Faust says.

Although well-known in pharmacy and healthcare circles, specialty pharmacy has largely been out of the spotlight. Not so PBMs, who have been pilloried for being profit-seeking middlemen and come under legislative and regulatory scrutiny. The massive tax-and-spending bill that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4 had PBM reform and regulations until they were removed in the 11th hour by the Senate. Faust has been to Washington, D.C., several times to lobby on PBM issues and testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in May 2025. Yet Faust finds the silver lining. “Coming into this role in an environment where it is so negative politically — it’s been challenging. But it also produces the opportunity to talk about our model and how our model is different and how we feel it aligns with what the intentions of the regulations are. We just want to make sure we educate as it relates to unintended consequences.”

More than just hockey

Faust grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Her father, Barry Cole, is a physicist who worked for Honeywell, and her mother, Mariette Cole, taught botany at colleges and universities in the Twin Cities. Faust says her family was academically centered. Hockey is an intense sport that involves an investment in equipment, hours of practice, often at odd times, and travel. But Faust said her parents instilled in her that “hockey was not everything of who I was and that I was far more dynamic than one could offer.” Both her grandfather and her father were inventors; her father has a significant number of patents. Invention and “this thinking outside the box” were very valued in her family.

Faust coached after the 2006 championship season but says that then she wanted to challenge herself academically, and she earned her doctor of pharmacy degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011. She says she was drawn to pharmacy partly because of her experience in the classroom: “I was one of those odd ducks that really loved organic chemistry.” But working with patients also appealed to her. “Being a pharmacist, you’re doing a lot of consulting and coaching of patients and even motivation. And you’re doing that in the community as kind of this first line.”

After working for Walgreens for a little under three years, Faust was recruited by Lumicera in its earliest days as a staff pharmacist. “It fit very well in terms of coaching, having longer discussions with members,” she says. Faust also warmed to the challenge of dealing with the explosion in the number of specialty drugs. She was continually promoted into roles of increasing responsibility during her 11 years at Lumicera, eventually becoming a senior vice president. Faust never imagined her career swerving so decidedly into the business side of pharmacy and pharmacy benefits. “When I went through pharmacy school, I would have never thought that I’d be so focused on business components. I always grew up thinking that I’m just a scientist or in that realm. But I think the ability to think creatively and strategically does align with business strategy.”

That strategy for Lumicera and Navitus involves touting their transparency and passing on any savings to plan sponsors. Faust emphasizes that patients also benefit from models that pass through any discounts. “If you have a patient with a 20% cost share, they’re going to benefit from a lower starting cost. If you’re using a traditional model and the price is $4,000, you’re going to pay 20% of $4,000. That’s going to look different than if you’re paying 20% of $2,000 or $3,000. By providing upfront savings on the claim cost, it’s produced savings for both patients and plan sponsors.”

Where Faust and Navitus part company with some of the PBM reform efforts are prohibitions on PBMs owning pharmacies. She mentions the Patients Before the Monopolies Act, sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a progressive Democrat from Massachusetts, and Sen. Josh Hawley, a conservative Republican from Missouri, among others, that would prohibit PBMs from owning pharmacies. She says that Navitus and Lumicera work to align incentives to pass through savings and that Navitus doesn’t penalize clients for buying drugs from a different specialty pharmacy. The combination of Navitus and Lumicera provides an opportunity for a “certain level of service and a certain level of savings” if clients want to choose it.

Freedom from fear

So many things were going Faust’s way in June 2022. She was climbing the ladder at Lumicera. She was married to Jesse Faust and had two active children, Roman and Piper. Then Jesse was in a serious car accident that fractured his cervical spine and left him a quadriplegic. “I’d been living my ideal, social media-worthy life until that fateful day in June 2022 when I received a call that my husband, Jesse, a firefighter for the City of Madison, had been in a very bad car accident,” Faust wrote in a Wisconsin alumni publication.

Three years later, Faust says her husband continues to make strides, but “it’s always ups and downs. In addition to the major physical challenges, there are the mental health ones. Mental health is also very, very important when you go from being a rough-and-tough firefighter to being dependent on others and trying to be a father in that scenario as well — a father and husband.” Faust says Jesse had no traumatic brain injury, so he is still very much the same person but is not able to move the same way. Getting family and friends to treat him like he is the same person is important to him, says Faust, and that can happen at the firehouse. “Those guys will still treat you like you.”

The accident and challenge of dealing with its aftermath have put things in perspective for her, says Faust, and given her a sense of calm.

“Even after stepping into this role, after that accident, and taking on a lot of responsibility, I have less of a notion of fear over things that are not to be feared, let’s say,” says Faust. “There’s this grounding of reality of OK, I’m going to present to this client. What’s the worst that could happen?” That vantage point, she says, has given her a little bit of freedom to step into her full potential and has influenced her leadership style. “I’m not being held back by those kinds of fears of things, because my perspective has been completely shifted about what is important and what is not,” Faust explains. “I am not saying that things aren’t important, but you get what I’m saying.”