A world without distributors
Distributors like Cencora are a critical link between pharmaceutical manufacturers and healthcare providers, helping patients access the medications they need. But what would a world without distributors look like? Taking distributors out of the pharmaceutical supply chain could cause far-reaching impacts that may surprise you.
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Cencora provides pharmaceutical distribution, a proficiency that extends well beyond healthcare logistics alone. Pharmaceutical manufacturers create life-changing therapies. Healthcare providers work to improve patient lives. Cencora is the critical link between the two, driving efficient, reliable, and secure access to the medications patients need.
Our robust and nimble distribution networks support the continuity of healthcare, even under the most challenging circumstances. The systems and processes we use every day ultimately offer providers more options and greater access to patient therapies.
But what would happen if distributors didn’t exist? Here are three ways healthcare in the United States could change.
1. Less innovation, more difficulty
For manufacturers, a world without distributors could shift focus away from innovation and toward infrastructure, ordering, billing, and collections. It could mean managing hundreds of thousands of healthcare provider customers.
For providers, in settings such as hospitals, pharmacies, and physician practices, it could mean managing accounts and orders from multiple manufacturers. The impact could be reflected in increased freight, ordering, and invoicing costs; delays in revenue generation; and financial risk exposure.
On average, here is how distributors provided support in 2024.
2. Billions in cost increases
Industry analysis quantified the financial benefits of distributors on healthcare and found them to be significant. Approximately 92 percent of distributor customers received deliveries of prescription pharmaceuticals five times per week or more, which can help control costs and reduce the need for long-term product storage.1
On average, here is how much product distributors moved through the pharmaceutical supply chain in 2024.
Without distributors, considerable savings from value-added services like generic sourcing, patient adherence programs, and solutions that help independent community pharmacies and practices thrive could vanish. The loss of these services could create patient access challenges and increased costs that might be passed on to consumers.
Additionally, for manufacturers to ship directly to healthcare providers and maintain the current service levels provided by distributors, the cost to the healthcare system could increase by as much as $78 billion dollars per year.2
1. 96th Edition HDA Factbook. Accessed March 2026. https://www.hda.org/publications/96th-edition-hda-factbook-the-facts,-figures-and-trends-in-healthcare
2. The Role of Distributors in the US Healthcare Industry. Accessed March 2026. https://www.hda.org/publications/the-role-of-distributors-in-the-us-healthcare-industry
3. Strained resources and elevated financial risk
Beyond these cost savings, distributors can help free up more of manufacturers’ time and resources for what they do best: developing innovative products.
Distributors also help mitigate financial risk for other stakeholders in the supply chain. We can help manufacturers recognize revenue sooner by taking immediate financial ownership of their products. Provider customers may then pay for these products on terms that reduce the time between dispense and reimbursement from third-party payers. Across the supply chain, this practice supports a marketplace that creates efficient, reliable access to the medications patients need most.
Distributors are essential to modern healthcare
Fortunately, patients all around the world can rely on the important work that distributors do to help make healthcare products available and affordable.
As a leader in healthcare and through our work in pharmaceutical distribution and product commercialization, Cencora is constantly striving to bring efficiency, resiliency, and cost savings to patients and our partners across the healthcare spectrum.
