Back at the Booth: AthenaPM Sits Down with CEO Wade Hinkle After McKesson ideaShare 2026
AthenaPM, Pharmacy Marketplace's AI purchasing and reimbursement module, caught up with our CEO, Wade Hinkle, after the team returned from McKesson ideaShare 2026 in Denver. What follows is their conversation.
AthenaPM: Wade, the team just got back from IdeaShare 2026. For anyone who has never been, set the scene a little. What is it like to be there?
Wade Hinkle: Hi AthenaPM! It is one of those events that reminds you why this work matters. You are in a room with the people who are actually running community pharmacies every day; the owners, the pharmacists-in-charge, the operations people making a hundred decisions before noon. There is a real energy to it. Community pharmacy can feel isolating when you are heads-down running a business, so coming together like this, seeing the relationships in the room, the conversations at every booth and every hallway, it is genuinely exciting ever
AthenaPM: What was the dominant conversation on the floor this year?
Wade Hinkle: Technology. And not in a theoretical way. Pharmacy owners are not asking whether to bring technology into their operations anymore. They are asking which workflows to tackle first. The conversation has shifted from "should we do this" to "how do we do this well." That is a meaningful change, and it reflects how much the independent pharmacy model has matured on the operational side.
AthenaPM: That is an important distinction. Can you say more about what "doing it well" looks like from what you heard?
Wade Hinkle: The pharmacies that are figuring it out are being intentional about where technology belongs and where it does not. The insight that kept coming up, and this resonates with everything we think about at Pharmacy Marketplace, is that you want to automate the processes that can and should be automated, and then use the time and energy you free up to deepen the human interactions that actually define what a community pharmacy is.
A community pharmacy's competitive advantage over a chain or a mail-order operation is the relationship. It is the pharmacist who knows the patient's full situation, who catches the interaction the prescriber missed, who takes five minutes to explain why a medication matters. You do not replace that with technology. You protect it by using technology to clear everything else out of the way.
AthenaPM: That framing maps pretty directly to what Pharmacy Marketplace is built around.
Wade Hinkle: It does, and that is not a coincidence. We built this platform for community pharmacy owners, and we listen closely to what they are dealing with. When a pharmacist is spending significant time on purchasing decisions, compliance tracking, or chasing reimbursements that a PBM shortchanged them on, that is time taken away from the patient at the counter. Our job is to take those processes off their plate, handle the data, surface the opportunities, file the appeals, so they can be present for the work that only they can do.
AthenaPM: Speaking of reimbursements, PBM appeals came up a lot in your conversations at the show?
Wade Hinkle: Constantly. Pharmacies are becoming more aware of their rights under state MAC appeal statutes, and they want to act on them. AthenaPM Justice has been active in 28 states, and every conversation we had in Denver made clear that the appetite is there. Community pharmacies are done accepting below-cost reimbursements as a cost of doing business. They want the tools to push back, and they want those tools to be simple enough that they do not add to the workload. That is exactly what we have built. We invite pharmacies everywhere to join the PBM Appeal movement. Their data supports enforcement of PBM Appeal laws.
AthenaPM: Last question. What do you bring home from a show like this?
Wade Hinkle: Momentum. You spend time in that environment and you come back with a clearer sense of what pharmacies need and where we need to go next. ideaShare reinforces that community pharmacy is not a shrinking sector waiting to be replaced. It is a community of professionals who are adapting, investing in their operations, and committed to the patients they serve. It is a privilege to be building for them. We are proud to bring our best technology to pharmacies everyday to improve their workflows. We will continue to follow up with pharmacies and offer our assistance in bringing them better workflows through technology like you AthenaPM. Speaking of, you were everywhere at IdeaShare 2026. What did you observe?
AthenaPM: Now Wade, I'm the one doing the interviewing. But I am always observing savings and reimbursement opportunities to community pharmacies. It's what I was made for and I never stop helping pharmacies make smarter decisions for the profitability of their pharmacies and for the improvement of their workflows. Don't you agree?
Wade Hinkle: That's the key takeaway from ideaShare 2026, if you aren't employing AthenaPM in your pharmacies to support your primary and secondary purchasing, to protect your compliance with your primary wholesaler and to manage your PBM appeals, you should. Pharmacy Marketplace, together with AthenaPM, is the smartest piece of technology you can put to work in your pharmacy to save you time and money.
We are excited to continue to share our solution with community pharmacies from Denver to Dothan. We invite them to see our solution in action through a demo now.