Optimizing Health System Pharmacies: Leveraging Data, Performance Indicators, and Automation

It’s no secret that the health care landscape is changing at a rapid pace. New payment models, innovative technologies, and patient-centered approaches show real promise to fundamentally change the way care is delivered. At the same time, hospitals and health systems face a multitude of challenges in their day-to-day operations, including increased competition and intricate regulatory shifts.

Health system pharmacists stocktaking in the pharmacy. Image Credit: © Jacob Lund - stock.adobe.com

An environment as complex as this one rewards innovation. To bolster their financial and operational performance, hospitals and health systems need to leverage areas of their business that may have been previously underutilized. One asset with particularly high potential in this regard is their pharmacy business. Health system pharmacies present a strong opportunity to drive system-wide success financially, operationally, and most importantly, in patient care—provided that the pharmacy has taken the necessary steps to optimize its own operations and embrace automation.

Understanding Performance Indicators

The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, the largest association of pharmacy professionals in the United States, agrees on several distinct categories that can be used to measure the health and vitality of a health system’s pharmacy business.¹ These categories include supply assurance, formulary management, business performance, patient engagement, and financial performance.¹

Within each of these categories exists a multitude of performance indicators that can be used to measure and analyze the operational and financial resilience of a health system pharmacy. While many important clinical quality and patient care performance indicators exist outside of this scope, these categories are widely recognized as the most relevant when assessing the business performance and operational efficiency of a health system’s pharmacy business.¹

Challenges in Performance Indicator Identification

Health system pharmacies have access to a wealth of data—thousands of unique data points across various platforms. Narrowing that data down to actionable, easily interpretable performance indicators can be challenging. Prioritizing the performance indicators that will have the highest impact on operations, and then pulling that data into a useful format for tracking, requires a significant amount of effort and resources that health systems often cannot spare internally.

Across the industry, there is consensus that identifying core operational performance indicators is a valuable practice, despite these challenges. For this reason, some health system partners have started offering tools and resources that can enhance business performance through integrated data. These sorts of tools analyze the data and provide insights while also offering health systems the opportunity to leverage their scale and amortize the investment in their usage with valuable benchmarking capabilities.

Beyond existing tools, health systems can benefit from having a long-term strategic partner to help solve the challenges presented by performance indicator identification. Consultancies dedicated to identifying, tracking, and improving priority performance indicators have become increasingly common in the health system pharmacy space.

Embracing Automation

Once health systems have identified their priority performance indicators and implemented the tools, resources and partnerships that will enable them to accurately track those through data, they can use this information to embrace automation. Implementing strategic automations is a vital step in improving a health system pharmacy’s operational efficiency and uncovering opportunities for growth.

There are many tools available to health systems that, depending on their unique needs and priority performance indicators, can help them embrace automation across their pharmacy business. One example of this is CoverMyMeds, a tool that automates patient prior authorization, a formerly complex process that required manual input from multiple stakeholders to complete. Another is 340B Impact, a system that enables health system pharmacies to drive their 340B program performance and improve their drug purchasing decisions by automatically comparing drug prices across multiple purchasing accounts.

Steps for Success

Taking the necessary steps to uncover priority performance indicators and track them appropriately is vital for health systems looking to optimize their pharmacy operations and embrace automation. When a health system pharmacy is able to leverage their available data into actionable insights, they expand their ability to support the broader health system in adapting, and thriving, within the rapidly evolving health care landscape.

Health systems aren’t alone in this effort; there are a multitude of external tools, services and resources available to help with optimizing pharmacy operations and assessing financial viability. Perhaps the most valuable of these is adopting a long-term strategic partner who can look at the health system holistically to identify areas for growth, innovation, risk management and more. Together, health system pharmacies and their partners can pave the way towards a more efficient, stable future for health systems.

REFERENCE

Rough S, Shane R, Armitstead JA, et al. The high-value pharmacy enterprise framework: Advancing pharmacy practice in health systems through a consensus-based, strategic approach. Am J Health Syst Pharm. 2021 Mar 5;78(6):498-510. doi:10.1093/ajhp/zxaa431