8 September 2022By Jay P. Rho, Pharm.D, FASHP, FCCP, Director of Pharmacy, Keck Hospital of USC Health Information Technology Adoption in Health-System Pharmacy IN MY OPINIONThe domain of pharmacists within a health system includes assuring the appropriate use and timely provision of medications. Pharmacists will review medication prescriptions for duplicate therapies, drug-drug interactions and allergies to avoid adverse events and medication errors.Pharmacy departments within health systems have traditionally relied on automation technology to perform oversight of medication inventory and drug distribution. Annual budgets for a large hospital pharmacy can often exceed 50 million dollars with hundreds of thousands of dollars in medication purchases flowing through a pharmacy daily. To track medication purchases as well as the distribution of medications throughout the hospital, pharmacies often utilize perpetual inventory software that helps manages the supply chain process. Intelligent inventory replenishment software can optimize inventory levels to reduce cost and waste by minimizing purchases of low use medications and quickly replenish high volume stock. Inventory management systems utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to learn dispensing patterns to optimize purchases of medications through contracted sources. In 2013, the federal government enacted the Drug Supply Chain Security Act to further secure our nation's drug supply. It outlined steps required to achieve interoperable, electronic tracing of products at the package level to identify and trace drugs as they are distributed to avoid counterfeit, stolen, contaminated, or otherwise harmful drugs. Tracing medication pedigree to this level of accountability will require further development of intelligent inventory systems.Hospital pharmacies have utilized stand-alone automated dispensing machines (ADC) since the late 1980s to stock and track medications on nursing units, emergency rooms and operating rooms to allow faster access to medications at the point of care. Today, these devices are computer-controlled by pharmacy and directly interfaced via enterprise servers with the hospital's electronic medical record (EMR), admissions/discharge/transfer, and billing systems to provide a complete record of medication dispensation. Medication can only be released from the device following the proper authentication of the user and prescription order as verified by a pharmacist. Database management Jay P. Rho
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