The health care industry continues to face financial and clinical challenges, with hospitals under pressure to maintain margins while delivering quality patient care. Amidst these challenges, 96% of chief financial officers cite high labor costs as a top cause of low operating margins, with lower reimbursement from payers (84%) and supply chain expenses (47%) following behind.1 Pharmacy is one of the largest cost centers in health care and has been historically impacted by manual workflow, inventory, and infrastructure challenges. The increasing prevalence of drug shortages combined with widespread labor shortages now necessitates an industry-wide, strategic approach to enhance efficiency and optimize financial performance while improving patient outcomes.
Understanding the Autonomous Pharmacy Vision
To address these challenges, health care leaders are collectively embracing the vision of the autonomous pharmacy, an industry-defined roadmap to a fully automated medication management infrastructure. A key objective of the autonomous pharmacy includes achieving zero medication errors by automating dispensing and inventory processes, which ultimately minimizes human error and supports precision in medication delivery. Another key goal is reducing waste through rigorous data collection and analysis that automates and optimizes inventory management. Automating the routine tasks currently associated with the medication use process seeks to allow clinicians to focus on direct patient care, which is a major boon for pharmacy, as pharmacy directors estimate that 76% of staff time is spent on non-clinical activities.2
Additionally, the autonomous pharmacy prioritizes 100% regulatory compliance through integrated technologies that uphold standards in medication management and patient data security. By leveraging data visibility and analytics, pharmacists can gain insights into medication usage patterns and treatment outcomes, supporting informed decision-making and personalized care strategies. The autonomous pharmacy strives to improve patient safety and overall health outcomes across all health care settings, paving the way for a more effective and patient-centric approach to pharmacy care.
Innovations in pharmacy technology have already shown promise in improving workflow efficiency and reducing errors through:
- Automation of Manual Tasks: Automating sorting, labeling, and inventory management tasks minimizes human error and frees up pharmacists for more patient-centric care. Robotic solutions can eliminate human error from intricate processes such as intravenous compounding, optimizing medication safety.
- Cloud-Based Infrastructure: Leveraging a connected cloud-based infrastructure enables real-time data insights that enhance decision-making and operational efficiency.
- Streamlined Workflow: Integrated workflow automation solutions streamline prescription processing and medication dispensing, optimizing pharmacy operations and saving valuable time for nursing and related clinical care.
- Data Intelligence Solutions: Holistic dashboards provide pharmacists with actionable insights into medication usage patterns and potential drug interactions, optimizing medication inventory decisions and facilitating personalized patient care.
The Autonomous Pharmacy Brought to Life: Texas Children’s Hospital & Baptist Health
About the Author
Lani Bertrand, RPh, is the senior director of clinical marketing and thought leadership at Omnicell, bringing over 2 decades of experience in pharmaceutical care and health care technology. With a deep commitment to advancing patient-centric care through innovative solutions, Bertrand leads initiatives that drive meaningful change in pharmacy operations and clinical outcomes. Prior to her role at Omnicell, Bertrand held key positions in pharmacy management and clinical leadership, earning recognition for her expertise in leveraging technology to optimize medication management and enhance patient safety. Lani holds a BS in Pharmacy, Pharmacy & Business from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and continues to be a passionate advocate for integrating cutting-edge technologies into health care delivery.
Many health systems are making significant advances toward an autonomous pharmacy vision, recognizing the opportunity to improve manual or inefficient processes to help improve patient care and operating margins. For example, Texas Children's Hospital (TCH), the largest children's hospital in the US, faced challenges, such as medication waste, due to expired drugs and inefficient inventory management. TCH purchases more than $150 million in pharmaceutical products each year yet had zero real-time visibility into that inventory. Time-consuming manual searches and inaccurate processes led to $2.5 million in expired medications and $17 million in dead stock inventory annually.
Embracing a vision for autonomous pharmacy, the health system upgraded over 250 automated dispensing cabinets across its facility, implemented central pharmacy robotics, and incorporated enterprise-wide data analytics to uncover new insights. Collectively, this investment in technology resulted in:
- A real-time inventory visibility increase of 95%;
- Proactive management of expiration dates and optimized purchasing based on actual medication utilization patterns, which led to a reduction in medication waste;
- And improved accuracy and the ability for pharmacy staff to focus on higher-impact activities thanks to automating dispensing tasks such as picking, scanning, and bagging medications.
Also seeking to optimize its pharmacy operations, Baptist Health, the largest health system in Kentucky, recently opened a new high-tech central pharmacy services center to serve as the medication hub for all 9 of the health care system’s hospitals. The space is optimized with a robotic infrastructure that can fill up to 14,000 prescriptions per 10-hour shift. The combination of seamless automation, intelligent software, and workflow integration simplifies medication management and streamlines operational efficiency across the enterprise, while providing the scalability to support growth and future pharmacy care needs.
As health care continuously evolves, there are valuable lessons to learn from the investments TCH and Baptist Health made in their pharmacies to better serve their organizations. The adoption of the autonomous pharmacy vision will be critical to a sustainable medication management ecosystem to reduce errors and free health care professionals to focus on what’s most important — direct patient care and clinical decision-making. Embracing the autonomous pharmacy vision represents the next step toward achieving pharmacy care excellence in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.
REFERENCES
1. HFMA. Health Systems near their breaking point. Labor costs continue to increase while dollars collected from payers decrease. HFMA. March 6, 2024. Accessed August 15, 2024. https://www.hfma.org/press-releases/health-systems-near-their-breaking-point-labor-costs-continue-to-increase-while-dollars-collected-from-payers-decreases/
2. Pedersen CA, Schneider PJ, Ganio MC, Scheckelhoff DJ. ASHP national survey of pharmacy practice in hospital settings: Monitoring and patient education—2018. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy. 2019;76(14):1038-1058. doi:10.1093/ajhp/zxz099
