By Kelley Taft, Senior Vice President for Membership, Health Industry Distributors Association
Digital commerce in healthcare distribution runs on product data. And like a lot of foundational infrastructure, it tends to get attention only when it falls short – an image that won’t render, an attribute that’s missing, a new item that takes weeks to onboard instead of days. Few companies have the bandwidth to tackle it, and no single company could solve it alone. It’s the kind of challenge that requires the whole industry to move together.
Without a shared standard for how product information is structured and exchanged, manufacturers and distributors have each built their own workarounds. Manufacturers field different data requests from different partners and reformat the same information multiple times over. Distributors piece together what they need to get products live on their digital channels. It’s time-consuming on both sides, and it’s become an accepted cost of doing business.
In February 2026, HIDA launched a pilot program with 33 member companies to test a Product Data Exchange (PDX) – a centralized, standardized way to share product descriptions, images, attributes, and marketing content across trading partners. The idea is straightforward: manufacturers build a strong product data set once, and it flows reliably to distributor partners in a format that’s ready to use.
The benefits are tangible on both sides of the transaction. Faster new item setup. Cleaner e-commerce listings. Less manual work on both sides of the transaction. And over time, a supply chain where product information is something companies can depend on rather than constantly chase down.
The PDX pilot is an early step, but it reflects something the industry has been ready for: a better way to share the data that makes digital commerce work.