Brent Wilhelm on Why Drug Shortages Persist Despite Available Inventory

In part 1 of a 3-part interview, Brent Wilhelm, Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain, Cencora, brings more than 30 years of healthcare industry experience to a role focused on getting pharmaceuticals from manufacturers to patients quickly, including specialty and temperature-controlled products, across both domestic and global networks.

Wilhelm explains that Cencora's US network relies on more than 25 distribution centers designed to place inventory close to customers based on anticipated demand, enabling delivery in a matter of hours. But that model runs into trouble when demand shifts unexpectedly, as it did during regional RSV outbreaks. "So when we have demand variability, moving inventory, although it's available somewhere in the network, it could be on the East Coast, but the demand's spiking on the West Coast," he says. Because repositioning inventory takes time, drugs can technically be in the supply chain yet unavailable where they're needed most.

The fix, Wilhelm argues, is closer integration between distributors and manufacturers so that real patient-level demand and dispensing data can inform planning decisions before shortages occur. That shift is increasingly urgent as treatments move toward more real-time administration and practitioners look to stock only what they need immediately rather than carrying inventory for future weeks. "The way that the supply chain is set up today across the US, it's much more of a historical demand, not a real time," he notes, pointing to a gap between how the system was built and how it now needs to function.

Wilhelm also sees artificial intelligence as essential to closing that gap, both for spotting demand signals in ordering patterns and for managing complexity around dosage strengths and formulations. A persistent blind spot, he says, is visibility into what's being dispensed at the point of care, a limitation Cencora is now discussing with larger customers as it works toward shared demand planning that protects supply chain resilience and patient safety.