Do More with Less: Reducing Management Burden with Hospital Pharmacy Automation

Hospital clinicians and pharmacy teams are busier than ever. Between managing tighter budgets, rising drug costs, navigating complex workflows and facing additional regulatory pressures–something has to give. Any opportunity to optimize and streamline hospital pharmacy management will prove valuable for long-term organizational success. In order to do more with less while adhering to evolving drug regulations, health systems must shift toward adopting RFID-powered hospital pharmacy automation systems. 

Hospital Pharmacy Management and Opportunities for Optimization

Managing hospital pharmacies efficiently can be a huge undertaking, especially when pharmacists are relying on outdated or manual logging processes. Several areas within the pharmacy that are long overdue for optimization include:

Medication inventory logging and tracking
Counting medication inventory and logging medications into systems usually requires a pharmacy technician to manually scan barcodes and input information by hand. When a medication needs to be dispersed to a different area of the hospital, the same process of scanning a barcode and manually inputting information into one or multiple systems must be repeated, or the pharmacy may lose track of it, which can negatively affect organizational compliance as well as patient care. 

This outdated process of scanning barcodes is not only time-consuming for clinical staff, but it also creates inaccurate data within systems due to human error. 

Medication ordering
Ordering medications is a responsibility that can come with many blind spots due to disconnected electronic systems within a hospital. Often, the person or team placing the orders will over-order to prevent stockouts, leading to storage issues as well as excess medication waste, which happens when drugs expire before they’re administered to patients. 

Managing the current supply of medications within a pharmacy
Hospitals pharmacies are responsible for managing tens of thousands of medications on a daily basis. Keeping track of expiration dates, usage, proper disposal, and recalls requires hands-on action from pharmacists and frequent proactive audits to keep up with regulatory and compliance.

All of these processes add to the workloads of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, who are chronically overworked. To streamline workflows and to ensure compliance, hospital pharmacies are shifting toward intelligent, automated solutions that enable end-to-end medication visibility.

Exploring Automation on Hospital Pharmacies

Intelligent, AI-powered automation solutions can greatly reduce the manual workload of pharmacy staff. Automation allows for data insights to be applied to processes, while also reducing the potential for human error. Instead of pharmacy technicians spending hours searching for expired or recalled medications, they can provide oversight or a final check to ensure that automation is effective. 

For pharmacy automation to be successful, there are several factors consider:

1. Data: Having accurate data is critical to inform the software system, as proactive notifications are automatically sent to pharmacy teams about medications that are expiring or being recalled. 
   
2. Interoperability: The system being used for automation must be able to “speak” to other existing systems within the pharmacy. The ability for a pharmacy automation system to connect with and pull data from existing systems is known as interoperability. Interoperability seamlessly allows data living throughout siloed systems to unite, ultimately reducing administrative burden and improving patient outcomes.
   
3. Compliance: Pharmacy teams can stay on top of regulatory and compliance requirements through easily accessible documentation, on-demand reporting capabilities, and secure logs.

For pharmacy staff to reap the benefits in full, they should couple automation with the right technology to further streamline processes and optimize workflows.

Optimizing Hospital Budgets and Processes with Pharmacy Automation

Medical and surgical supplies are among the top three largest expenses within hospitals’ budget. And automation in a hospital pharmacy can uncover significant cost savings by reducing waste due to over-ordering.

Here’s a step-by-step process of how automation is utilized inside of a hospital pharmacy that can positively impact revenue:

RFID tags are placed on medications – either by the manufacturer or at the pharmacy – making it possible to collect real-time data on status and location of drugs with less manual work (no need to scan individual barcodes). Then, data collected from the RFID tags feeds a cloud-based software system that can analyze and generate predictions, such as usage trends or anomalies in use, which can prevent drug diversion as well as over-administering.

As this data is collected into an intelligent software system, processes like ordering are optimized and automated based on data, allowing the software to make well-informed decisions and reducing risk of over-ordering and waste, which can create significant cost savings.

When automation is present and working well in pharmacies, hospitals can expect to see reduced medication errors, better hospital pharmacy budget monitoring based on in-depth insights, improved tracking of recalled medications, and more accurate charge capture. 

One of the most important benefits if the long-term savings associated with reduced labor costs and fewer errors. According to an Intelliguard case study, replenishing a single medication kit or tray manually can take a pharmacy technician anywhere from 20-30 minutes. However, with RFID automation, this time was reduced to three minutes per tray. Additionally, with RFID-powered medication management systems, pharmacists saved over $100,000 per pharmacist per year.

More Data Accuracy, More Control

Automation isn’t meant to replace clinical professionals. It is a way to help streamline time-consuming workflows so that providers can practice at the top of their licenses and provide optimal care.

Pharmacy automation is achieved with interoperable software to perform tasks that are informed by real-word data, which results in reducing human error and optimizing operations across not only the pharmacy, but across the entire healthcare organization.

Enhanced regulatory requirements demand that pharmacies have end-to-end visibility into critical medications and inventory across multiple sites. And that is possible today with RFID-powered pharmacy automation systems, like Mira Prep, that offer greater than 99.9% accuracy.