Susan LaFountain
Product Manager, Industry Adoption for Advanced Automation
GHX

Moderator: Elizabeth Hilla
Senior Vice President, Content
HIDA

Whether you’re new to healthcare contract administration or a longtime veteran, this pre-conference networking and education event is for you! We’ll take a close look at the most common processes involved in pricing management and chargebacks, and share resources you can use every day. This introductory workshop provides a foundational overview of contract administration principles and practices in the healthcare supply chain, preparing attendees to engage with conference programming.

Meet the fellow contract administration leaders you'll be working with to improve pricing accuracy, advance best practices, and more. Arrive early and join us Monday evening for the Welcome Reception. Enjoy cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, and great conversation as you reconnect with colleagues and meet new industry peers. It’s a relaxed way to ease into the week and set the stage for meaningful connections.

Start the day with a good breakfast — and start 2026 with good partnership-building.

See how the latest tech can improve pricing accuracy and contracting processes.

Take advantage of multiple opportunities to recharge and network.

Priya Gismondi
Sr. Director & GM, Channel and Specialty Data Services
IQVIA MedTech

Susan LaFountain
Product Manager, Industry Adoption for Advanced Automation
GHX

Jesse Throgmorton
Director, Global Business & Financial Services – Medical Chargebacks
Cardinal Health

In this power-packed session, industry leaders will share rapid-fire best practices that set the benchmark for contracting standards.

See how the latest tech can improve pricing accuracy and contracting processes.

Explore new technologies and build new partnerships that can transform your contract administration processes.

Jessica Penizotto
Associate Vice President, Commercial Excellence
Baxter International, Inc.

Annette Blumer
Senior Manager, Contract Administration
Baxter International, Inc.

Price activation is the process through which a customer requests eligibility for qualifying contract tiers. This interactive session will build on industry efforts to improve this process by exploring Baxter's work with GPO partners, examining key challenges in price activation workflows, discussing strategies to bridge the gap between customer expectations and supplier capabilities, and identifying best practices for managing requests, approvals, and implementation.

Susan LaFountain
Product Manager, Industry Adoption for Advanced Automation
GHX

Kendyl Moore
Manager, Global Business and Finance Services – Medical Chargebacks
Cardinal Health

If you want to improve chargeback communications, it’s time to adopt the EDI formats custom-designed for these transactions.

• Compare the benefits of using the 844 vs the 867 for chargeback requests
• Understand how the 849 can enable trading partners to resolve issues and reconcile more quickly
• Move beyond the basics and understand how to make it happen

Erica McDaniel
Senior Director, Continuum of Care Contract Operations
Premier, Inc.

Determining customer eligibility for the various tiers of GPO contract pricing is hard — and even harder in non-acute and post-acute markets. This working session will explore ways to overcome the challenges through better collaboration among trading partner

• Share your experiences with non-acute eligibility challenges, such as locations rostered with multiple GPOs and those thorny class-of-trade discrepancies
• Identify the steps necessary to get customers on appropriate tiers
• Identify where eligibility identification standards don’t exist and should
• Create a roadmap for improvement

Ashley York, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
Manager, Medical Chargebacks & Pricing
Cardinal Health

Lean focuses on streamlining processes and removing non-value-added activities – exactly what’s needed in the world of contract administration.

• Learn Lean principles and tools
• Participate in small group activities to witness lean six sigma benefits
• Take home a toolkit you can use to make your processes leaner

David Quattlebaum
Partner
MedProcure, LLC

Managing contracts and pricing for non-hospital customers like physician offices or nursing homes is a monster challenge. In this session, get ideas for taming the beast by effectively managing contract expirations. We’ll discuss:

• Why contract expirations, renewals, and rollovers create so many opportunities for errors and rework – especially on the non-acute side
• How to manage and automate each step using EDI or APIs
• What matters most when loading pricing and eligibility
• Who manages communications with providers, and ensures that they are correctly assigned to tiers and classes of trade
• Why roster management is so critical, and how to do it better

Explore and develop a key contracting resource in a focused small group with plenty of time for open conversation. Share questions, ideas and experiences!

Take advantage of multiple opportunities to recharge and network.

Join a roundtable with a cross-section of contract admin professionals — distributors, manufacturers, GPOs, providers, and tech solution experts — to share your experiences, hear new perspectives, and better understand how your processes affect supply chain partners.

Sean Bubernak
Director, Master Data & Contract Administration
Advent Health

Omar Devlin
Executive Director, Supply Chain Planning & P2P
Stanford Medicine

Tina Nam
Director, Strategic Sourcing & Contract Administration
Parkland Health

Industry leaders discuss key contracting considerations from the provider perspective, including contract compliance, multi-source versus single-source strategies, pricing alignment, and other critical factors that influence successful supplier-provider partnerships.

See how the latest tech can improve pricing accuracy and contracting processes.

Start the day with a good breakfast — and start 2026 with good partnership-building.

Tony Pericle
Founder
ProfitOptics

Claim discrepancies require skilled knowledge workers to manually reconcile data across multiple systems, a time-consuming and error-prone process. In this session, you’ll see how Generative AI can be used to parse the details of a pricing discrepancy and pull relevant data from disparate sources to create a clear, supportable response.

• See a demonstration of how this works
• Find out how to design and implement the model, including the secure data environment, LLM selection, and other operational considerations
• Understand how the system can increase accuracy while reducing labor costs across the contract administration lifecycle.

Kelly Vincent
Director, Commercial Contract Operations
BD

Explore solutions for addressing chargeback rejections caused by late notifications between distributors and manufacturers.

Usher Klein
CEO
Finesse Contracts

For contract administrators, precision matters —but in non-acute markets, success also means enabling sales teams to identify and secure the most competitive pricing tiers for their customers.

• Discuss the obstacles that keep customers from accessing the best tiers
• Consider new ways to help reps deliver better pricing for non-acute providers
• Explore how AI and other tech tools can quickly identify accounts that should be elevated to higher tiers based on current spend, and flag opportunities to consolidate purchases to access higher tiers

Melanie Proctor
VP, Supply Chain Data Management
Premier, Inc.

Elizabeth Hilla
Senior Vice President, Content
HIDA

Explore a key contracting challenge in an interactive workshop group with plenty of time for open conversation. Share questions, ideas and experiences!

Take advantage of multiple opportunities to recharge and network.