Q&A: The Importance of ASHP’s 2025 Pharmacy Forecast

Since 2012, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) has released its Pharmacy Forecast each year, detailing opportunities and challenges pharmacy leaders may face in their profession in the near future.¹ In December 2024, ASHP released its 13th edition of the forecast, with increasing drug prices and gaps in primary care highlighted as key challenges and utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) as an opportunity, among many others.²

“The Pharmacy Forecast is a critically important resource for both academic and pharmacy practice leaders to ensure that the profession is well positioned to contribute in meaningful ways to changes in the health care system,” said Joseph DiPiro, PharmD, FCCP, FAAAS.¹

The 2025 Pharmacy Forecast is the ASHP Foundation's 13th edition of the report. | image credit: Harry / stock.adobe.com

DiPiro served as one of the contributing editors in this year’s forecast. He joined Drug Topics to discuss overarching themes of this year’s edition and what exactly industry leaders should take from it going forward in their profession. More specifically, he touched on health-system pharmacists and how they are key providers within a health system.

READ MORE: Ambulatory Care Pharmacists to Decrease PCP Workload, Increase Patient Access | ASHP Midyear

Stay tuned for more Drug Topics interviews regarding the ASHP 2025 Pharmacy Forecast. As we meet with authors and industry leaders that contributed to the report, we will discuss some of its main sections, including addressing the gap in primary care, managing ultra-high-cost drugs, and so much more.

Drug Topics: Can you briefly describe what exactly the Pharmacy Forecast is and why it was created?

Joseph DiPiro: This began about 13 years ago, under the leadership of Bill Zellmer, BS Pharm, MPH, at ASHP with a prime purpose of being a tool for pharmacy leaders as they do strategic planning. This has been the prime purpose for each of those editions. One of the key parts of the forecast is a survey of pharmacy leaders, but it's a lot more than that. We begin with a group of advisory committee members. These are people who are experts in various aspects of the pharmacy field and enterprise. They help us decide what domains to pursue.

Then a survey is constructed that goes out to 300 leaders in pharmacy around the country. The other parts of this survey [are] given to chapter authors who put together an analysis and interpretation from the survey results and put their spin on it as well. The final part of it is, in each of the chapters are recommendations that are meant for pharmacy leaders. Those are the key components of the forecast.

Drug Topics: Authors of the report’s foreword mention how the forecast touches on factors influencing patient care, the health of populations, health systems, and the pharmacy profession. Of these main factors, is there one that sticks out to you as most important or taking precedent within the report?

Joseph DiPiro: At one level, none of the topics supersedes any of the others, and it depends on your perspective. However, one area that we're just beginning to understand— that'll likely have an influence on all of the others—is artificial intelligence and how it's applied within pharmacy and within health care. Then again, perhaps one other, would be pharmacy workforce, which is obviously fundamental for all of these other areas. We can't do much without a good pharmacy staff. While they're all important, I think those 2 have wide-ranging impact over all of the others.

In a way, they're both interconnected with all of the other domains. Just one example, if AI is already being applied, people working in pharmacy need to know more about it, need to understand it. We need experts in AI as it's being applied within the pharmacy enterprise.

Drug Topics: Where do you see health-system pharmacy now and where do you see it going in the future?

Joseph DiPiro: I started in hospital pharmacy 53 years ago [in] 1971. So many things that we thought were impossible to do, we now see as being routine parts of pharmacy. It's just a lot of different directions. Obviously, we've come a long way in terms of development of patient-oriented services; that will continue. We'd like to see pharmacists play a larger role in primary care, be it within health systems or in clinics that are related to health systems.

Obviously, the technology is presenting greater opportunities by the day, and combine that with artificial intelligence. So, all that is key. Another area that's talked about in the forecast report also is ultra-high-cost drugs, trying to manage the cost of medications. And now medications and other therapies talk about cell and gene therapies that could cost a million dollars per patient. It's a huge task for pharmacists to be managing all of this within the context of a health system.

READ MORE: Health System Resource Center

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References

1. Pharmacy Forecast. American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Foundation. December 9, 2024. Accessed January 17, 2025. https://www.ashpfoundation.org/research/pharmacy-forecast

2. DiPiro JT, Hoffman JM, Tichy E, et al. ASHP and ASHP Foundation Pharmacy Forecast 2025: Strategic planning guidance for pharmacy departments in hospitals and health systems. AJHP. 2024;82(2). doi.org/10.1093/ajhp/zxae280