Every day, more than 200 cancer patients are treated at the Mayo Clinic. Clayton Irvine, PharmD, Senior Manager of Oncology Cancer Care, said that having digital visibility, or the ability to view information about available therapies in information technology (IT) systems, is “critical” to their operations. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to see which treatments from a list that includes chemotherapy, immunotherapy and investigational medicines have been used and which ones patients may need in the future.

Hospital and health system pharmacies are looking to streamline processes to better manage inventory, control costs, reduce waste and enhance patient safety. However, many healthcare organizations use disjointed systems and manual processes which don’t support the digital visibility that could help them achieve all those goals.

“We don’t really have models where we can use predictive analytics to help us anticipate what our needs will be,” said Irvine. “Instead, we rely on a lot of manual processes to understand what we have available, as well as a lot of people placing orders, doing counts and reviewing what’s in our inventory to try to anticipate what we might need later.”

Understanding the status quo

David Aguero, PharmD, Director of Medication Systems and Informatics at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, agreed that digital visibility would be a great benefit to help keep track of medications, including expensive investigational medicines, controlled substances or other therapies that may require special handling.

“We want to be able to trust the pedigree of any product,” he said. “We want to know where it is now and where it’s been from a recall perspective. If there’s a specific value placed on the product, whether from a monetary perspective or from a formulary perspective, or because we need to protect it because it’s a controlled substance or for National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) purposes, we benefit when we can have digital visibility into that product.”

If current systems supported this, Irvine added, not only would organizations like the Mayo Clinic be able to better control and manage costs, but they would also be able to accommodate newer and more expansive therapies.

“Space is finite. It’s everyone’s biggest barrier when it comes to inventory,” he explained. “If we could have better visibility into inventory management, we could make more available space for different and newer therapies. We might then be able to treat more rare cases because we would have not only the ability to store those different therapies but the flexibility from a financial standpoint to expand treatment options.”

Digital visibility improves with RFID and 2D barcodes

While IT systems support more automated medication management processes, the addition of RFID and 2D barcodes can support greater digital visibility. Both RFID and 2D barcodes hold more data than traditional one-dimensional barcodes, which makes it possible to add information pertinent to pharmacies such as lot numbers and expiration dates. Newer IT solutions that leverage these solutions are working to fill the gaps that currently exist in medication management, automatically updating various pharmacy systems about the location and stock levels of medications.

“We need smart systems with drug 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,” said Irvine. “The solution should also know that we have X vials of a certain drug, but they are all going to expire soon so we need to schedule the right patients before then or order what we need to get through the week.”

Aguero added that any new solution would need to relieve pharmacists and pharmacy technicians of the time-consuming burden of adding RFID tags to drugs. Today, pharmacy techs can spend half the day manually tagging items. When those medications are pre-tagged by the manufacturer, saving those hours, it provides more value to the health system.

“When you have RFID, you can see the product move around and that is a big advantage. Being able to pull that information into the inventory system is an even bigger advantage, especially if the medication comes pre-tagged so I don’t have to take someone offline to intercept and tag it,” he said. “But, ultimately, what we want to see are technologies and solutions that can reduce our workload while increasing our visibility of the medications that our patients need.”

Some healthcare organizations may be hesitant about adopting new technologies, said Irvine. But new solutions that support RFID and 2D barcode technologies have the power to expand digital visibility and empower pharmacies to provide safer and higher quality care to patients at lower costs.

“When we can try these new solutions and take the staff resources that are currently being used to do manual processes and counts to instead complement and improve our practice, we are going to see benefits across the board,” he said. “And it’s going to come through in the kind of care we provide our patients.”