More than 200 cancer patients are treated at Mayo Clinic each day. Clayton Irvine, PharmD, senior manager of Oncology Cancer Care, said digital visibility—the ability to see information about available therapies in information technology (IT) systems—is “critical” to their business. Unfortunately, it’s not always effortless to see which therapies have been used from a list of chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and experimental drugs and which ones patients might need in the future.
Hospital and health system pharmacies are looking to streamline processes to better manage inventory, control costs, reduce waste, and improve patient safety. Yet many health care organizations are using disconnected systems and manual processes that lack the digital visibility that could assist them achieve all of these goals.
“We don’t really have models where we can use predictive analytics to help us predict what our needs will be,” Irvine said. “Instead, we rely on a lot of manual processes to understand what we have available, and a lot of people placing orders, doing counts, looking at what’s in our inventory to try to predict what we might need later.”
Understanding the status quo
David Aguero, M.D., director of medical systems and information technology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, said digital visibility would be a huge advantage in helping track medications, including exorbitant research drugs, controlled substances or other therapies that may require special handling.
“We want to be able to trust the pedigree of each product,” he said. “We want to know where it is now and where it was from a recall perspective. If there is a value to the product, whether from a monetary perspective or from a formulation perspective, or because we need to protect it because it is a controlled substance or for National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) purposes, we benefit when we can have digital visibility of that product.”
Irvine added that if current systems allowed this, organizations like Mayo Clinic would not only be able to better control and manage costs, but they would also be able to operate newer and more advanced therapies.
“Space is limited. That’s the biggest barrier for anyone when it comes to inventory,” he explained. “If we could have better visibility into inventory management, we could open up more space for different and newer therapies. Then we could treat rarer cases because we would not only have the ability to store those different therapies, but also the flexibility from a financial standpoint to expand treatment options.”
Improving Digital Visibility with RFID and 2D Barcodes
As IT systems support more automated medication management processes, adding RFID and 2D barcodes can provide greater digital visibility. Both RFID and 2D barcodes store more data than classic one-dimensional barcodes, allowing for the addition of information that is significant to pharmacies, such as batch numbers and expiration dates. Newer IT solutions that leverage these technologies are working to fill the gaps that currently exist in medication management by automatically updating various pharmacy systems with the location and inventory levels of medications.
“We need intelligent systems with medication waste management, systems with predictive analytics, and systems that can take what we have in our electronic health records and create models to anticipate and predict patient needs,” Irvine said. “The solution also needs to know that we have X number of vials of a certain medication, but they’re all going to expire soon, so we need to schedule the right patients before that or order what we need to get through the week.”
Aguero added that any up-to-date solution would have to relieve pharmacists and pharmacy technicians of the time-consuming burden of adding RFID tags to medications. Currently, pharmacy technicians can spend half their day manually tagging items. When those medications are pre-tagged by the manufacturer, saving those hours provides greater value to the healthcare system.
“When you have RFID, you can see how the product moves, and that’s a big advantage. Being able to pull that information into the inventory system is an even bigger advantage, especially if the medication is pre-labeled so I don’t have to disconnect someone from the network to capture it and label it,” he said. “But ultimately, we want to see technologies and solutions that can reduce our workload while also increasing our visibility into the medications that our patients need.”
Some healthcare organizations may be hesitant to adopt up-to-date technologies, Irvine said. But up-to-date solutions that support RFID and 2D barcode technologies have the power to expand digital visibility and enable pharmacies to provide safer, higher-quality care to patients at lower costs.
“When we can try these new solutions and leverage the staff resources that are currently being used to do manual processes and counting to complement and enhance our practice, we’ll see benefits across the board,” he said. “And that will translate into the type of care we provide to our patients.”