If there’s a predominant trend in healthcare today, it’s that health systems are getting larger. Whether it’s the result of merger and acquisition activity or organic growth, health systems are increasingly expanding across broad geographic regions. This shift provides several advantages stemming from economies of scale, but it also makes many traditional operational procedures less efficient.
Medication management is a prime example. As health systems add locations, continuing to maintain dedicated pharmacy operations for each facility in the network can lead to a fragmented, multi-vendor environment with complex and redundant workflows. This reality is leading to the rise of the Central Pharmacy Services Center – a model where pharmacy operations are centralized in a single location, enabling a health system to standardize and streamline all medication management processes (e.g., procurement, preparation, storage dispensing, replenishment, etc.) across the enterprise.
Baptist Health Sees Promise in Centralizing Pharmacy Services
Baptist Health, a large health system serving Kentucky and Southern Indiana, is an early adopter of this centralized approach. The provider opened the doors of a newly constructed Central Pharmacy Services Center (CPSC) in La Grange, Kentucky in June. The 102,000 square-foot facility will serve as the medication hub for the health system’s nine hospitals, 450+ clinics, outpatient facilities, and retail pharmacies.
For Baptist, multiple organizational, pharmacy, and patient care drivers influenced its decision to centralize pharmacy services. Chief among them were staffing shortages, rising medication costs, inadequate inventory visibility resulting from multiple supply chain systems, and overall workflow inefficiencies.
“Creating a standardized system capable of widespread formulary and inventory management for all our facility types – whether it be a hospital, clinic, or retail pharmacy – was also important to us,” says Nilesh Desai, RPh, and Chief Pharmacy Officer for Baptist Health.
Automation is Crucial to a Successful CPSC Strategy
Baptist’s strategy for its CPSC started by ensuring the initiative aligned with the health system’s overall mission and goals. Next, a budget and financial impact forecast were drafted, and funding was secured. Another key step in the process was defining the scope of services for the CPSC and securing the location and space necessary to optimize logistics and support scalability for ongoing expansion.
Ensuring the CPSC embodied the ideal of the Autonomous Pharmacy – an industry-defined vision to automate key medication management processes to maximize safety, efficiency, and human potential – was also important to Baptist.
“We wanted the CPSC to be truly autonomous and incorporate automation at all points of the medication use process – from the supply chain to clinical and administrative procedures,” says Desai.
Baptist leaders visited supply chain operations in other industries to see how these organizations leveraged automation and determine which techniques could be best applied to its CPSC.
When it came to implementing its own automation technology, Baptist partnered with several vendors including Omnicell, whose Central Med Automation Service provides medication dispensing robots, carousels, dispensing software, and expert services to automate and streamline inventory management and distribution. Other vendors were enlisted to provide enterprise visibility software, conveyance systems, and medication delivery integration to fill any automation gaps. All these technologies were ultimately integrated to provide a seamless experience.
“Our robots, carousels, and conveyors are fully connected all the way out to the loading dock,” says Desai.
Increased Operational Efficiency Enables Greater Focus on Clinical Care
Baptist’s CPSC is designed to support a wide scope of services including automated dispensing cabinet and anesthesia cabinet fills, clinic and community pharmacy fills, centralized packaging, centralized order verification and inventory management, medication reconciliation, and more. The facility went live with prescription fulfillments on August 12 and will continue to roll out technology and services through June 2025, when the facility will become fully operational.
Baptist’s CPSC can fulfill 14,000 prescriptions for the health system each day and robotic automation is one of the key reasons this is possible.
“Without the automated dispensing robots from Omnicell, we’d have to employ 3x as many full-time employees (FTEs) to manually manage all the medication sorting and cart fills,” says Desai. “With the automation we have in place we can manage medication distribution for our entire health system with fewer FTEs.”
This newfound efficiency will provide Baptist’s clinical pharmacists the freedom to spend more time at the bedside consulting with patients, which will directly contribute to improved patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes.