Health systems are working to streamline operations by centralizing all medication processes in one location: central pharmacy service centers.
These hubs are designed to optimize pharmacy operations, improve patient care and reduce costs by consolidating medication-related processes for health systems.
Here are 10 things to know about central pharmacy centers, their rise in prominence and their impact on healthcare.
What is a central pharmacy service center?
- A CPSC consolidates all pharmacy operations for a health system, including medication procurement, storage, dispensing and inventory management.
- The goal of the centers is to streamline these processes across multiple hospitals, clinics, outpatient facilities and retail pharmacies within a given health system.
What's giving way to their rise?
- As health systems grow through mergers and acquisitions, managing multiple pharmacy operations at each facility can become inefficient and costly.
- Central pharmacy centers are designed to provide a solution by reducing redundancy and simplifying medication management. By streamlining medication distribution and administrative tasks, these centers can free up clinical pharmacists to focus more on direct patient care and inpatient services.
Baptist Health's central pharmacy model
- In June, Baptist Health, which serves Kentucky and Southern Indiana, opened a $40 million, 102,000-square-foot central pharmacy center in La Grange, Ky. The facility now supports nine hospitals and more than 450 outpatient clinics, enabling a more efficient medication management process across the entire health system.
- Some key features of these centers include having the capability to fill 14,000 prescriptions per day, patients being able to request prescriptions through a mobile app or phone call, and enabling greater visibility for inventory.
- Nilesh Desai, chief pharmacy officer at Baptist Health, told Becker's the project was driven by hospital pharmacies being at maximum capacity, expired medications leading to excess waste, staffing constraints and the inability to expand growth to new clinics and care areas. Some of the key practices being implemented through Baptist Health's central pharmacy center include hospital, community and clinic formulary management, inventory management and distribution and centralized medication reconciliation.
At least one-third of U.S. hospitals have a central pharmacy
- Detroit-based Henry Ford Health has taken a significant leap forward in centralizing pharmacy operations. In September, the health system opened a 45,000-square-foot centralized pharmacy services center. The fully automated facility processes more than 1,000 requests per day and is designed to save the health system $30 million over five years. The center also features advanced technology that automatically orders medications at the best price and discards expired drugs.
Before the innovation, pharmacy staff at each of Henry Ford's locations manually tracked inventory, which led to inefficiencies, a lack of standardization and difficulty in forecasting medication supply needs, the health system said.
- RWJBarnabas Health has developed its own model with a centralized pharmacy warehouse, a facility designed to provide non-compounded products to all hospitals in the health system.
The warehouse enables the procurement of bulk, cost-reduced purchases and direct purchasing of products experiencing national shortages. In 2023, the centralized warehouse contributed more than $2 million in savings and, in addition to bulk medications, played a crucial role in the procurement of vaccines, including the distribution of more than 53,000 flu vaccine doses across the system's hospitals.