NDC COORDINATION AND IMPLEMENTATION FORUM
For Pharmacies
When NDC transition goes wrong, it's not a system error. It's a patient standing at the counter.
FDA's 12-digit NDC format takes effect in 2033, touching every system between your wholesaler order and your dispensing counter, including inventory, scanning, and claims adjudication. All of them depend on the same identifier resolving correctly. The NDC Forum connects pharmacies with the wholesalers, payers, and technology vendors whose readiness determines yours.
The Challenge
Pharmacies manage the physical product and the data at the same time, ordering, inventory, and prescribing on one side; billing, registries, and reimbursement on the other. Your dependencies reach nearly every other actor in this ecosystem, which means a failure anywhere upstream shows up as a failure at your dispensing counter: a claim that rejects, a barcode that won't scan, a product that can't be reconciled against what your system expects.
Dispensing, inventory, and reimbursement all depend on the same identifier resolving correctly, every time
Dual-format operation during the transition period creates real risk of scan failures and claim rejections
Formulary management and purchasing decisions depend on vendors and trading partners you don't control being ready on time
The consequences of a mismatch aren't abstract; they're a prescription that doesn't go out the door
How the Forum Helps
Understand downstream impacts before they hit your dispensing workflow, not after a claim rejects.
Learn how vendors and trading partners are actually preparing, so your own planning isn't built on assumptions.
Stay ahead of implementation considerations specific to pharmacy operations, purchasing, and reimbursement.
Get a direct channel into cross-sector coordination, instead of waiting for guidance to trickle down.
Why Checking Every Vendor Yourself Isn't the Same as Coordination
Industry advice right now, including from senior supply-chain leaders, is telling pharmacists to ask hard questions of every vendor and trading partner individually: your dispensing software provider, your wholesaler, your adjudication platform. That's the right instinct, and it's also an enormous amount of one-off legwork for a single pharmacy or chain to carry alone.
Interrogating each vendor separately tells you what that vendor claims about their own timeline. It doesn't tell you whether those timelines actually line up with each other.
Trade press advice can tell you what to ask. It can't coordinate the answer across your wholesaler, your PBM, and your dispensing software vendor at the same time.
The pharmacies best positioned by 2033 won't be the ones who asked the most questions. They'll be the ones who had visibility into whether the answers they got actually fit together.
The Forum is where that fitting-together happens, across your actual trading partners, not one vendor call at a time.
Your patients don't experience "NDC-12 readiness." They experience whether their prescription is ready when they arrive. Make sure it is.
Get Involved
Organizational Membership
Annual Membership
$5,000
per organization
Unlimited participants from your organization
Access to all quarterly forums, strike forces, and other events
Full access to tools, outputs, and shared resources
Per-Participant Access
Virtual
Quarterly Forums
$399
per person
In-Person
Forums
TBD
per person
Attend quarterly forums on a per-person basis, ideal for organizations exploring participation before committing to full membership.
2026 Forum Dates:
September 23
December 8-9
Strike force participation available to organizational members only.