Bottom Line: To convert TRICARE coverage into realized commercial volume, pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers must look beyond formulary placement and actively provide product-specific guidance on how to navigate TRICARE's distinct eligibility, referral, and pre-authorization workflows. The TRICARE program covers more than 9.6 million active-duty service members, retirees, and their dependents. For pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, this represents a

Bottom Line: The VA's accelerated EHR deployment is centralizing clinical decisions. To preserve market access, commercial teams must prove how their therapies reduce operational friction within this standardized baseline. The recent deployment of the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) Federal Electronic Health Record (EHR) system across its first wave of four hospitals in Michigan and its second wave of four hospitals in Ohio and Northern Kentucky marks a critical shift for

Bottom Line: Manufacturers of prenatal diagnostics who look at the VA and the IHS see two agencies with almost no internal maternity footprint and conclude there is nothing to sell into. The opposite is true. Both agencies deliver maternity care through community providers - clinicians manufacturers are frequently already calling on — which means the volume is not absent, it is unrecognized. The work is in identifying it and getting paid correctly for it. For manufacturers of

Bottom Line: The BAP cleared a massive volume of previously stalled DoD P&T Committee decisions. To protect market share and prevent access disruptions, manufacturers must act now. In late June 2026, the Department of Defense (DoD) Uniform Formulary Beneficiary Advisory Panel (BAP) held a public meeting that ended all Defense Health Agency (DHA) delays on final drug placement. The BAP systematically reviewed decisions from the eight previous Pharmacy and Therapeutics (P&T) Co

Bottom Line Recognizing federal sales patterns as real-world evidence gives manufacturers the clinical validation private payers can use to justify coverage decisions. Pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers that treat the execution of their Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) as the finish line of a sales journey rather than the starting point of a much more valuable evidence cycle miss a critical opportunity. When a manufacturer views its FSS sales solely through a transa

Bottom Line: The Defense Health Agency’s unified network model requires manufacturers to align sales force structures to properly leverage local clinical utilization into regional data for network-wide product adoption across the military health infrastructure As the Defense Health Agency (DHA) combined its 20+ regional markets into 9 Defense Health Networks, it effectively rendered traditional commercial sales maps obsolete for this arena. Pharmaceutical and medical device m

Bottom Line: Maximizing returns in the federal segment requires a pivot toward a model of high-precision strategic intervention that protects operational focus while providing the technical depth necessary to secure a durable competitive advantage. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Department of Defense (DoD), and the Indian Health Service (IHS) do not behave like traditional payers; they are integrated health systems that serve as both the payer and the provider.

Bottom Line: Future market access in IHS depends on implementation of a sovereign account model that recognizes Tribal nations as high-agility delivery networks prioritizing clinical autonomy, cultural integration, and long-term medical self-sufficiency. For medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers, the Indian Health Service (IHS) has historically been approached as a traditional federal payer similar to the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) or Defense Health Agency

Bottom Line By pivoting its 2025–2030 Strategic Plan toward a high-velocity functional mandate, the DHA is prioritizing mission-availability. Manufacturers must take this moment to evaluate current messaging and recalibrate their own messaging to show a direct reduction in warfighter downtime. The Defense Health Agency (DHA) is currently navigating a fundamental structural evolution between its established 2025–2030 Strategic Plan and a new set of performance-driven mandates

Bottom Line: The PACT Act significantly scaled the VHA’s care mission. Manufacturers succeed by aligning their clinical data with the system's operational goal of providing efficient, high-volume Veteran care. The PACT Act of 2022 represents the largest expansion in VA beneficiaries in a generation, fundamentally altering the VHA’s scope of responsibilities and its operational priorities. With millions of new Veterans now eligible for care, the health system is managing a sig

Bottom Line The 2026 VA RISE reorganization marginalizes the legacy site-by-site adoption approach, rendering local facility-level relationships insufficient and requiring a pivot toward an enterprise-aligned value strategy. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is currently executing its most significant structural transformation in three decades: the Restructure for Impact and Sustainability Effort (RISE). By consolidating 18 Veterans Integrated Service Networks (VISNs) i

Bottom Line: Manufacturers stall their federal growth by treating specialized government health care system the same as standard commercial accounts, effectively ensuring their clinical value remains misaligned with the fundamental mission of the agencies. In commercial markets, manufacturers compete through pricing strategies, contracting leverage, and incremental clinical differentiation. Success in these sectors is measured as frequently as by quarterly shifts in market sh