Fundamental changes to the way pharmaceutical drugs are manufactured and distributed may someday give us a more resilient, cost-effective supply chain. Meanwhile, health system pharmacists are the ones left to solve the day-to-day problems of delivering essential meds to patients in the midst of shortages; balancing the use of high-cost meds and equally-effective, lower-cost meds; anticipating changes in demand; and, reducing unnecessary waste. Let’s arm them with data.
The first step in managing drug shortages is to become aware of newly emerging shortages as early as possible. The earlier you know, the more options you have to take constructive steps toward mitigating the effects on patients. LogicStream makes health system pharmacists aware of new shortages up to several weeks ahead of public notifications. We pool data across the hundreds of hospitals using our software solutions — data that includes wholesaler deliveries, EHR content, inventory levels and utilization — as the basis for Artificial Intelligence models.
Once you know about a new shortage, it’s time for swift action based on clinical decisions. Adjustments to wholesale purchasing may be one element of the strategy, but that shouldn’t be the whole strategy. LogicStream arms clinical pharmacists with data to answer crucial questions — What (and where) is our inventory? How is utilization trending? How many days on hand? Which departments and providers account for most of the utilization? Are we well-positioned to shift to substitute meds? How are order sets influencing utilization? LogicStream gives pharmacists and the rest of your clinical staff the workflow tools they need to act in a coordinated way.
Those same crucial questions — and many more — apply to the thousands of other drugs managed by your Pharmacy department, not just shortages. LogicStream gives your pharmacists, technicians and buyers access to data for all these medications. We retrieve purchasing data from your wholesalers; inventory and transaction data from your automated dispensing systems; ordering and administration data from your electronic health records. We combine all this into LogicStream’s own unified, clinical data model.
We give clinical end users self-service access to the LogicStream data model. LogicStream reduces your dependence on IT projects to create reports or analytics resources. Has your pharmacy staff recently completed a Medication Use Evaluation (MUE) or cost management initiative and been hindered by access to data? LogicStream fills those gaps and gives you more complete and more timely results.
LogicStream delivers cloud-based, Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. Initial implementation requires minimal IT effort. We use out-of-the box integration with data sources — no need to build interfaces or extract, transform and load (ETL) processes. We take pride in our responsiveness to customers’ support needs and their requests for new product features. We view every new customer engagement as the first step to a long-term partnership.
Let us show you how LogicStream Health is helping other health system Pharmacies use clinical data to make sound decisions about drug shortages, and drug supply in general. Get answers to your questions about The Drug Supply App or schedule your 20-minute demonstration by clicking the button below.