Group purchasing organization Vizient said Nov. 8 it has created the End Drug Shortage Alliance to bring together stakeholders across the pharmaceutical supply chain to strategize ways to combat drug shortages.
Vizient said in a news release the alliance will bring together other GPOs, drug manufacturers and distributors to work together to improve access to medications through greater transparency across the supply chain. It will also focus on improving the quality of manufacturing drugs.
"Providers and patients have had to suffer the consequences of drug shortages for too long," Dan Kistner, PharmD, group senior vice president of pharmacy solutions for Vizient, said in the release. "It's a critical problem that is too big to tackle as individual organizations."
Vizient said the number of active drug shortages in the U.S. has remained above 200 since 2017. In 2019, a member survey the GPO conducted showed that managing drug shortages costs U.S. hospitals more than $359 million annually in labor alone.
Read the full news release here.