Category: Federal Forum Posters
Purpose: Pharmacy inventory management systems have the potential to save money on inventory, expedite workflow, and lead to accurate medication ordering. Pharmogistics(TM) was implemented at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center to manage pharmacy inventory. Since implementation, our pharmacy has continued to have stock-outs on high-use medications, resulting in emergency ordering, increased costs, and burden to pharmacy workflow. The goal of this project is to evaluate current inventory management workflow in order to identify and mitigate current process defects that may be contributing to stock-outs and need for emergency ordering of high-use medications.
Methods: In order to optimize our use of the inventory management system, we plan to use the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) framework to identify and mitigate process defects and lean approaches to identify areas of waste in the inventory management process. This investigation will focus on high-use medications as defined by the top 200 medications ordered and dispensed by the pharmacy. Excluded medications will be those on back order and those not in the top 200 medications ordered and dispensed. Baseline stock-out reports and emergency orders from April 2018 to August 2018 will be reviewed to capture the number of stock-outs and emergency orders per week over time. A report with daily usage of high-use medications will be created to obtain time-sensitive trends, and the usage data will be analyzed with Minitab to improve and refine PAR levels of high-use medications. Data will be analyzed to identify inadequate PAR levels and other process related problems that may be contributing to stock-outs and emergency ordering. The primary metric will be the number of stock-outs per week of high-use medications, which will be tracked over the improvement period.
Results: not applicable
Conclusion: not applicable
Christopher Blum
– PGY1 Pharmacy Resident, VA Northeast Ohio Healthcare System, Cleveland Heights, OH137 Views