The pharmacy department at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, has rolled out a medication tracking system that, officials said, has reduced waste by 32 percent.

According to officials at the 1,058-bed tertiary care hospital, savings have occurred by reducing obsolete inventory.

The MedBoard system, offered by Bellevue, Wash.-based Pharmacy OneSource, went live in April 2009 for pilot testing and was fully implemented in July. It tracks about 12,000 doses a month, with a focus on high-priority and high-cost medications, and is gradually being expanded to include more medications and nursing units.

MedBoard has reduced missing medication requests from 150-175 per day to 90 per day, officials said, allowing for a 32 percent reduction in waste costs in the first six months. Projected savings for 2010 are expected to be more than $90,000, with productivity gains of $12,000 in pharmacist time and $50,000 for hospital staff based on phone calls and missing med requests.

The total return on investment for 2010 is expected to exceed $150,000, according to pharmacy officials, while patients benefit from more timely delivery of medications.

"Some patients need their medications within minutes," said Bob Hammond, Riverside's pharmacy operations manager. "Our goal is to get the highest-priority medications to them within 15 minutes."

Riverside is part of the Ohio Health System, which includes 17 hospitals that operate throughout 40 counties.

Riverside executives estimated the pharmacy was receiving about 400 calls per day from nurses, including those  seeking the location of medications in the distribution process and asking when they would be delivered. Missing medication requests led to frustrated staff and tension between departments, they said.

In addition, officials said, the department's obsolete inventory cost the hospital $250,000 annually due to normal shelf-life expiration and duplicate doses generating waste.

Pharmacy OneSource's barcode-driven MedBoard system reduces delivery times and is designed to improve pharmacy productivity and reduce medication waste, officials said.

"We like to call it the 'FedEx of the pharmacy world' because it tracks the medications that nurses are waiting for just like FedEx tracks a package," said Charles McCluskey, director of pharmacy and pulmonary services at Riverside.

The hospital's pharmacy processes an average of 6,000 orders (or 13,000 doses) a day for 130 different delivery sites in the hospital. Written orders are sent to the pharmacy to be processed, compounded, labeled and dispensed.

The new technology scans labels through each step in the chain to update the order status and location. It also eliminates the need for replacing lost or late doses, prioritizes order preparation to ensure delivery of time-sensitive orders and decreases pharmacy and nursing time searching for doses.

The defining feature of MedBoard, according to Pharmacy OneSource officials, is an information screen, called a status board, that is accessed through a secure and HIPAA-compliant Internet site and displays in real time the priority, status and location of a medication.

Nurses have sometimes had to wait 30 minutes or more to know when their medications left the pharmacy and where they were delivered, McCluskey said. "Now we know who is delivering what to where within seconds," he said.

The status boards are displayed on two 42-inch plasma TV screens in the pharmacy and are available on any hospital computer to authorized nurses. Each medication is color coded on the board, with red signifying overdue, yellow indicating approaching overdue and green meaning in progress.