10 Imperatives of a Medication Intelligence System to Streamline the Pharmacy Lifecycle

Balancing priorities in today’s healthcare sector offers unique opportunities for growth and innovation. 

While hospitals and health systems consolidate to leverage economies of scale, healthcare delivery is evolving to be more accessible, with a shift towards more care being provided outside the four walls of the hospital, in clinics and other outpatient settings. This trend of “decentralization” of care opens the door to new ways of thinking about management, technology and patient service. 

For hospital pharmacy leaders, this shift is an exciting challenge. 

By expanding their roles to include oversight of hospitals, clinics, retail and specialty, that associated scaling brings added growth and complexity across the supply chain; often without an equivalent expansion of staff and technology. With a strategic and thoughtful approach, leaders can harness existing resources to effectively meet the needs of each location.

However, managing supply chains and unique operational challenges across multiple sites, functions, and teams combined with factors such as drug diversion, shortages, recalls, etc. is a herculean task. Current challenges are often met with “one-off” solutions without considering cohesive, “big picture” environments. Enterprise solutions that extend across different operations and care settings offer a consolidated and scalable approach to pharmacy operations, compliance, and finance. Focusing on comprehensive strategies and embracing flexible technology solutions arms pharmacy leaders to stay ahead of industry changes, connect teams, and integrate information efficiently. 

When planning new initiatives or vetting vendors, here are 10 imperatives to consider for your future-ready pharmacy management operation:

1. Strive to create a medication intelligence operating system. Seek out solutions that provide actionable information at a granular level that can be leveraged to optimize pharmacy workflows, control drug spend, and increase safety and compliance. 
2. Digitize your entire pharmaceutical supply chain. Upgrade your medication supply chain with automated data collection. Track every process across all locations and suppliers. Gain real-time insights for improved efficiency and patient safety. Automated, data-driven supply chain collaboration is possible, essential, and easier than you think to achieve.
3. Document actions automatically. Automate documentation with technology to unlock data-driven insights, ensure compliance, and prevent costly errors and fines.
4. Educate and increase transparency. Empower authorized staff to track any dose instantly: its location, origin, and cost – boosting efficiency, accountability, and patient safety.
5. Generate actionable insights. Data volume alone doesn’t foster good decisions. Pharmacy management systems should deliver insights and make decisions based on outcomes driven analytics on easy-to-use dashboards.
6. Be recall ready. Track every medication, everywhere. Gain instant visibility into the location and status of every dose in your system to maximize efficiency, safety, and rapid response to recalls.
7. Don’t get caught short. Predict and prevent drug shortages. Leverage data-driven insights and predictive models to anticipate shortages, optimize inventory, and free up staff for value-added patient care.
8. Prevent and confirm drug diversion. Monitoring and surveillance solutions should provide an end-to-end workflow that both prevents drug diversion across nursing, OR, and pharmacy operations – and confirms it when it happens. Insist on automated closed-loop transaction reconciliation that synthesizes data from your ADCs, EHR, wholesaler, controlled substance vault, and time and attendance reports. 
9. Automate 340B compliance. Ensure program integrity and maximize savings with technology that streamlines compliance, simplifies audits, and optimizes workflows, protecting your margins and freeing up staff.
10. Automate cost optimization. The average hospital needs to consider 20,000 NDCs daily and 10,000 price changes weekly. Your system should pinpoint alternative equivalent NDCs at lower costs and generate offers to purchase discounted short-dated inventory based on your consumption rates. 

Change is a constant in health care, and economic pressure continues to be strong. A solution for healthcare professionals is better control, visibility, and insight into every pharmacy operation from the manufacturer through patient administration.

Photo: Stuart Ritchie, Getty Images

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