Amid a looming shortage of pharmacists, health system pharmacy leaders are increasing their investments in technology and leveling up roles, according to a survey of 324 pharmacy directors of general and children's hospitals.
The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists conducted the survey, which found that inpatient pharmacists independently prescribe medications in 26.7% of hospitals. Here are 39 other statistics to know about hospital pharmacies:
Data analytics
- Advanced analytics, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics, are used in 5.7% of hospitals.
Pharmacy service-level integration
- Three in five hospitals report some integration to optimize patient care transitions, and about 25% are not at all integrated.
- About a fourth of hospitals report they are not at all integrated. About 13% consider themselves mostly integrated, and 1.8% report they are seamlessly integrated. The level of integration has increased over the last few years.
Advanced pharmacy technician roles
- Hospital pharmacy technicians most commonly work in purchasing (98.7%), billing (68.4%), controlled substance management (52.3%), information technology system management (48.7%), 340B program management (47.6%), responsibility for USP chapter compliance (46.9%), regulatory compliance (46.2%), initiation of medication reconciliation (42.7%), and technicians supervising other technicians (37.4%).
Outpatient clinics
- Pharmacists work in ambulatory or primary care clinics in 54.2% of hospital operating outpatient clinics.
Distribution
- Most hospitals, 86.1%, use automated dispensing cabinets as the primary method of maintenance dose distribution. Nearly 12% use centralized manual unit dose and 2% primarily use an automated robot in their central pharmacy.
- To verify doses during dispensing in the pharmacy, 73.6% of hospitals use machine-readable coding.
- About a third of hospitals require five or more characters for access to nonprofiled medications in ADCs, and 67.4% require four or fewer characters.
- Twenty-seven percent of hospitals use a carousel, a high-density medication storage and retrieval system that automates medication dispensing in central pharmacies.
- Robots dispense unit doses in 6.5% of hospitals.
- About 22% of hospitals used RFID tags.
Sterile compounding
- Barcode scanning to verify ingredients is used in 53.6% of hospitals.
- Compounded sterile preparation workflow management software is used in 31% of hospitals.
- Pictures or video of the compounding process is used by 38.6% of hospital pharmacies.
- Gravimetrics to verify dose, amount, and volume is used by 7.7% of hospital pharmacies.
- About a third do not use any technologies for compounding sterile preparations.
- Only 3.7% of hospitals use automation for compounding sterile preparations, and 2.9% use a sterile compounding robot.
Autoverification
- Autoverification functionality in EHRs are used in 73.4% of hospitals.
Centralized shared services
- Most hospitals (80.6%) do not have a centralized shared service pharmacy in their system. About 10% has a standalone CSS pharmacy, and 5.4% of hospitals serve as the CSS pharmacy and distribute medications to other system hospitals.
Diversion prevention
- More than half (58%) of hospitals use diversion detection software to monitor controlled substances.
Staff vacancies
- Overall, 4.3% of full time pharmacist positions and 9% of full time pharmacy technician roles are vacant in hospitals.