The Challenge

Hospitals struggle to make informed decisions when shortages arise due to the lack of data integration and analytics available to them. This results in prioritization and communication failures that strain staff and capacity, contribute to overspending and impact patient care.

The current state of siloed data, resource scarcity and lack of market visibility creates a paradigm where the majority of hospital shortage response is designed around reacting and does not allow for proactive efforts that address the core challenges of shortage response and mitigation.

The core challenges of shortage response include:

1. Inventory and utilization visibility
2. Likelihood of impact
3. Prioritization
4. Market availability
5. Decision-making and Communication

Even hospitals with well-resourced departments and highly trained staff must contend with these core challenges. While tools that provide some inventory visibility are available via Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and Automated Dispensing Systems, hospitals are still left with the challenges of leveraging resources for prioritization, finding market alternatives, decision-making and communicating action plans. A hospital cannot stop a shortage from occurring, but with the ability to focus on ALL core domains, it can better mitigate the impact.

The challenge, then, is to create a new system that arms hospital pharmacies with an integrated view of the gold standard of shortage identification, prior purchasing trends as a data stream for prioritization, along with market visibility and class-leading clinical guidance to minimize the impact of shortages and move to a new state of proactive vs. reactive shortage management.

Solution

Automate prioritization to focus only on the shortages that matter while streamlining communication.

Incorporate historical purchasing trends into a shortage prioritization and mitigation workflow tool that includes shortage signals from the FDA and ASHP’s Drug Shortage Programming Interface (API).

CostCheck, from Bluesight, incorporates purchasing data from its spend optimization engine and integrates FDA and ASHP drug shortage signals that help hospitals automatically identify and prioritize only potentially impactful shortages.

With National Drug Code (NDC) signals from the FDA and ASHP and the proprietary matching algorithm that powers the CostCheck Spend Optimization Engine, the software imputes potential generic level equivalent impact from NDC shortage signals. This allows CostCheck to capture and prioritize not only where a specific NDC might impact a hospital, but also any related ‘domino effect’ shortages. This advanced prioritization provides the hospital with a meaningful increase in its ability to proactively plan mitigation and communicate strategies through workflow and communication tools.

Consolidate all mitigation decisions and workflow into prioritized shortages with market transparency and clinical guidance.

What do you do once you know a shortage is prioritized and needs a response? You look for the most similar alternative available. With the integration of ASHP and FDA shortage data and vendor availability into its Spend Optimization Engine, CostCheck provides a snapshot of the market landscape when a shortage is identified. This allows for directed guidance on market availability of all matched generics for mitigating and responding to shortages, eliminating the need to guess and check for sourcing alternatives and empowering hospitals to focus responses to prioritized shortages.

But what happens when there are no direct substitutable NDCs available? With the power of the ASHP Drug Shortage API, CostCheck also provides the gold standard clinical guidance from ASHP. Hospitals can view class-leading guidance, including tables and decision matrices, directly from ASHP within the CostCheck workflow and decision support tools and even quickly copy and insert ASHP guidance into their mitigation plans.

Outcomes

Efficient prioritization and enhanced communication

CostCheck’s automatically prioritized shortages and decision support workflows, powered by the ASHP Drug Shortage API, allows a regional, 864-bed, 340B, not-for-profit hospital to efficiently manage and prioritize shortages daily. The CostCheck suite of shortage tools allows for seamless integration and utilization in weekly staff meetings while keeping all communication and decisions centrally housed in the CostCheck software.

Improved market visibility

Market visibility is instrumental in evaluating mitigation options and developing response plans. With the integration of supplier data and ASHP shortage signals, CostCheck achieves a better and more transparent view of available alternatives. This produces quicker and more efficient decision-making, ensures no mitigation opportunities are missed and streamlines the planning process. Additionally, the enhanced market visibility from ASHP shortage signals allows for the refinement of the Spend Optimization Engine, thus driving better financial outcomes.

Soft and Hard dollar savings

Not only has this hospital achieved more efficient and robust communication, but it also executed this without adding additional staff or software solutions. In fact, the outcomes achieved with CostCheck are occurring with greater efficiency and less time investment from the baseline. However, efficiency and time savings, while impactful, cannot always be directly translated into savings for the hospital's bottom line.

The integration of ASHP shortage signals drives refinement in algorithms and generates savings recommendations by focusing attention and prioritizing opportunities with market availability. In addition to enhanced shortage response, this regional hospital’s staff has achieved hard dollar savings of over $475,000 in the past calendar year by spending just minutes a day leveraging CostCheck’s NDC optimizations. They also saved valuable time by not wading through countless spreadsheets of potential opportunities only to find that most of them were nullified by shortages.

The combined power of ASHP shortage data and CostCheck’s Spend Optimization Engine delivers streamlined shortage prioritization and mitigation responses, robust communication, and hard dollar savings with no increase in staff.