Every healthcare professional wants to create an environment that ensures effective, safe care for patients. Yet we are often blocked from those patient-centered activities by technology, process, and resource constraints.
Pharmacy serves as an excellent case study of this challenge. Here we have a highly educated clinical team, able to both lead and participate in a wide range of patient-centered initiatives, and what do they spend much of their time doing? Ordering medication, moving it from place to place, and searching desperately when it goes missing. We have expensive medications that are so critical to patient care, yet even the most sophisticated health systems are still stuck searching shelves trying to find them.
Our natural inclination is to focus on technology to solve these challenges and redeploy our resources to more direct patient activities. But we have all experienced enough technology implementation to know the technical investment is just one leg of that stool – some form of process change is required, along with the resources to ensure effective deployment and maintenance to ensure a balanced approach.
Here is where most technology investments fall short. Consider the pharmacy again – we are now asking that same over-burdened team to add ‘Effective implementation and use of Technology A’ to their workload. But even when that technology provides some initial relief, there is always another initiative or crisis that pops up. Management of that great new investment and process starts to slip, and old habits creep back in.
What if we considered an alternative model, one where we ask more of the vendors who developed this technology (and who want it to succeed as much as we do)? What if we asked them to commit to our success and support our operations not just during implementation, but on an ongoing basis?
Let’s consider the benefits of that approach in a real-world example where pharmacy supply chain technology is backed by ongoing services provided by the vendor:
Lower Pharmacy Costs: The pharmacy department is usually the hospital’s third largest cost center and a significant portion of that budget is typically spent on medication inventory and drug costs. Combining services with medication management technology helps pharmacists understand the cadence and types of drugs to order based on ordering habits and expiration dates, so less medications go to waste. Wasted medications represent a direct loss of investment – with some medications costing thousands of dollars, even a small improvement can have a large impact. Additionally, designated support for pharmacy technology can monitor the immense amounts of data being recorded to identify patterns such as price changes, which helps hospital staff buy ahead of price increases. Data and marketplace trends such as medication shortages are provided to the health system, so the pharmacy knows when certain drugs might be in short supply. These combined capabilities greatly help lower hospital costs.
● Actionable Plans from Data Insights: Medication management technology compiles data, and then the resources staff helps turn this data into actionable plans. The software pulls pharmacy data together while dedicated staff can focus on researching the meaning of that data. The results help pharmacists make decisions such as how to prioritize their work, which items count most for inventory, medication expiration timelines, and more. Technology services can provide pharmacists with recommendations and show hospital staff the last time a medication was short, the last time a drug fully ran out, and average daily usage. This information also shows the pharmacy department how to execute action plans after the services team has highlighted what’s most important.
● Improved Prioritization: I often struggled prioritizing my tasks in the hospital pharmacy since I felt bombarded by administrative duties, and how to balance both short-term and long-term goals. By assigning service backing to your technology, not only can you glean what the appropriate interventions are, you can also better identify and prioritize which activities are most in line with overall organization goals. By offering insights from someone who isn’t as ‘in the weeds’ of day-to-day pharmacy activity, there is better balance between tactical needs and organizational priorities. Ideally, this solution helps streamline operations, allowing pharmacists to focus on their clinical activities, which in turn improves patient outcomes, the number one priority of the hospital.
As advancements in technology continue to evolve and gain greater adoption, health systems need to recognize the importance of creating the best infrastructure to support implementation – a combination of technology, process and resources. Health systems should expect that best practice for our industry is a deeper partnership from their vendor partners – one where both parties are engaged in and committed to long-term success.
Curtis McEntire, MBA, brings more than 10 years of Pharmacy Supply Chain Solutions expertise to help educate Omnicell’s healthcare partners about ways supply chain tools drive savings and safety improvements. As Pharmacy Sourcing Manager for Intermountain Healthcare, Curtis developed the business case for the implementation of centralizing various pharmacy services at Intermountain Healthcare’s Kem C. Gardner Supply Chain Center. He also managed a $250 million pharmaceutical contracting and spend budget for Intermountain’s 22 hospitals and more than 185 clinics. Curtis received a Bachelors of Science degree in Finance from the University of Utah, and his Healthcare Management MBA from Western Governor’s University.
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