While economists fret about deflation, Rosemary Pitts, vice president of finance for the nuclear pharmacy services division of Cardinal Health, found her most recent challenge involved a major price hike.

"We had a large cost increase in one of our raw materials in the nuclear medicine business," says Pitts. "There are only five reactors in the world that make medical isotopes, and one of them was shut down, so 20% of the supply was gone and our costs went way up."

Given the price hike, "we had to either lose profits or convince our customers–cardiology clinics and hospitals, who themselves were suffering from falling demand and reimbursement pressures–to agree to our passing on the higher prices," Pitts says. "Because we were the first supplier to raise our prices, we had to do a lot of work with our sales team, but we ended up being successful at getting our customers to agree to higher prices."