#536 - Is 340B really going away — or finally becoming infrastructure? | Kim Tzoumakas (CEO, VytlOne)

Kim Tzoumakas is the CEO of VytlOne, the nation's only independent, fully integrated total pharmacy solutions partner — the century-old company formerly known as Maxor, which she rebranded and merged with ProxsysRx in a fast-moving transformation after taking the helm in January 2025. VytlOne partners with mission-driven hospitals and health systems, combining pharmacy operations, 340B management, specialty pharmacy, pharmacy benefit management, and patient affordability solutions to help nonprofit providers unlock revenue and reinvest in their communities — work that generated $1.4 billion for its pharmacy partners in a single year. Its newest bet is VytlAIQ, an end-to-end intelligence platform built ground-up (not grafted onto a legacy system) that connects clinical, pharmacy, payer, and financial data into one real-time platform, surfacing next-best actions and checking every 340B claim for eligibility and documentation so problems get caught before they cost providers money. Kim came to pharmacy the long way around — two decades as a healthcare attorney embedded in hospitals and health systems, then CEO of RAYUS Radiology and 21st Century Oncology. Her core conviction is that 340B isn't a loophole to be abused or a relic on its way out; it's critical infrastructure that lets nonprofit health systems reinvest in patient care, and the real failure is that the tools serving it stayed reactive, fragmented, and manual. VytlOne's bet is that AI belongs in pharmacy not to replace clinical judgment or wipe out teams, but as an intelligent partner that tears down the administrative barriers — prior auth, denied claims, missing documentation — standing between a patient and their medication. The test of success: a patient who simply feels their care move faster and never once thinks about the software behind it.We discuss:Why the first thing Kim checks in any business isn't the P&L — it's the boards, the ownership model, and financial stability that determine whether a CEO can actually win — and what twenty years as a healthcare attorney inside hospitals taught her to seeThe real story on 340B: why the "it's going away" prediction has been wrong for thirty years, why the program is now evolving faster and getting more complex, and the one scenario where hospitals genuinely are in the wrong — double-dipping on rebatesHow you build a product when the rules might change next quarter — launching VytlAIQ right as the courts threw out the 340B rebate model, and why VytlOne built it from the ground up with pharmacists at the table instead of stitching together what already existedWhy most health-system dashboards get built and then ignored — and what makes a platform a pharmacist and a CFO will actually act on: one centralized, real-time source feeding the EHR that tracks every claim all the way through to payment receivedWhat you can't afford to break when you rebrand and merge a hundred-year-old company fast — protecting the culture and the people who gave decades to the organization while still turning the cornerThe uncomfortable truth for a CFO who's been burned by vendors — why pharmacy teams reflexively say "we already do that," where the skepticism about third parties really comes from, and how to turn a ten-million-dollar opportunity into a win-win instead of a threatWhere the line sits between what AI should decide versus only suggest in pharmacy — why it should never make a clinical or licensed decision — and the legal risks Kim sees as tech players rush into healthcare without understanding the guardrails, patient risks, or regulatory historyWhat Kim learned mentoring veterans through the Pat Tillman Foundation about fear of failure and hard choices — and the five-years-out test for VytlAIQ: a patient in specialty or chronic care who simply feels faster access to their medication and never connects it back to the software—Brought to you by: Sage Growth Partners — Value-focused strategy and marketing for growth-driven healthcare organizations. — Where to find Jared: • X: https://x.com/jaredstaylor • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredstaylor/