How a Large Health System Pharmacy Automates Their Inventory Planning and Optimization
Large West Coast Health System
6,000+
West Coast
Inventory Planning and Optimization
Automate Manual Monitoring
Plenful’s Inventory Planning Solution provides real-time monitoring for an organization’s specific patient population and medication inventory needs, configurable to its crosswalks and access requirements. Empower your team to prioritize high-value notifications rather than manually processing critical inventory and patient information.
Proactive Forecasting
Utilizing historical data and ongoing automations, Plenful’s Inventory Optimization Solution enables teams to plan for both their near-term and longer-term needs to support their patient populations. Particularly crucial for certain disease states, Plenful offers entity-specific insights and a centralized systematic tool for teams to strategically make decisions and proactively provide notifications.
Centralize Critical Medication Knowledge
Plenful’s system mitigates the risk of institutional knowledge being solely retained by individual team members and their specialized workflows. With rising labor turnover and employee burnout, remove inventory monitoring from your team’s responsibilities and incorporate proactive automation to increase output.
SVP of Pharmacy Operations
Introduction
Large Health System Pharmacy Automates Inventory Planning and Optimization
This premier health system boasts a robust pharmacy team, including in-house specialty pharmacy, retail pharmacy, and infusion pharmacy, supporting thousands of patients across the West Coast. With a focus on developing the best operational processes for its pharmacy operations team and the patients they serve, the health system sought innovative solutions to enhance its inventory planning and optimization workflows to deliver high-quality care for its specialty patients while preventing waste.
Challenge
Need to automate highly manual and reactive inventory planning and monitoring
Managing a robust medication inventory program across many medications and disparate systems posed significant challenges for this large health system. Its team handles thousands of prescriptions per month across its pharmacy offerings, requiring pharmacists to spend time navigating fragmented Excel sheets and clicking through various systems and tabs on an ad hoc basis to track inventory due to the entity-specific inputs needed, even at the NDC level. The manual work is critical to address risks associated with shortages while balancing the wastage of high-value medications. In addition, critical institutional workflow knowledge is otherwise only accessible to certain key team members. There is also a desire to proactively monitor and plan for the future to optimize inventory, financial outcomes, and patient care
Solution
Using Plenful to streamline inventory and automate notifications
Plenful collaborated with the Health System Pharmacy team to understand their workflow nuances and configured its Inventory Optimization Solution to meet the organization’s unique needs. This process included connecting to multiple unstructured and structured data sources, utilizing Plenful’s crosswalk reconciliation capabilities for medications, accumulations, NDCs, and other specifications. Plenful's solution automates the health system's pharmacy medication inventory management, offering analytics on medication usage and expected usage patterns, as well as reconciling wholesaler order data
“This is an obvious use-case fit for Plenful’s capabilities given the many data inputs and rules that go into our inventory processes.”
Director of Pharmacy
Results
Plenful’s solution provides proactive automation to critical medication workflows
- Enhanced Efficiency: Plenful reduces the time and manual effort required for ongoing monitoring and reconciliation associated with inventory planning and optimization, allowing teams to eliminate this repetitive work
- Automated Reconciliation Notification: By connecting and processing current inventory and medication order history, Plenful proactively surfaces medications ahead of configurable notifications such as shortage levels
- Holistic Forecasting: Access one central hub for all inventory optimization and crosswalk data, using Plenful’s real-time dashboarding and analytics layer. Utilized historical and ongoing data outputs to plan future inventory with AI predictive analytics
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