IU Well being’s new pharmacy hub goals to chop prices
A pharmacy technician inspects orders crammed by robots on the central fill line. (IBJ picture/Eric Discovered)
It’s practically as massive as 15 basketball courts positioned finish to finish and is stacked with 1000’s of medicines, from anxiousness drugs to most cancers remedies.
However it’s not a nook drugstore and doesn’t take any walk-in enterprise. It’s Indiana College Well being’s new pharmacy hub and distribution heart in Plainfield—stretching 70,000 sq. toes—with sufficient drugs, lotions, and infusible and injectable medication underneath one roof to produce its 16 hospitals and tons of of clinics for weeks.
The Indianapolis-based hospital system is hoping the pharmacy hub, which opened this summer season, will assist it cut back the price of offering pharmaceutics to sufferers and its insurance-plan members by centralizing and standardizing its pharmacy provide chain. It didn’t say how a lot costs would possibly drop.
Many hospitals sharply mark up the value of medicine, particularly specialty medication to deal with sufferers with most cancers, imaginative and prescient loss, low white-blood-cell rely and different critical illnesses. Throughout the nation, hospitals routinely mark up costs on medication a mean of 250%—and a few greater than 500%, in accordance with a 2021 research by Sanford Bernstein.
IU Well being mentioned it’s “dedicated to creating important medicines extra accessible and inexpensive.” It added that it provides monetary counseling to sufferers to attach them to discounted medicines, which resulted in affected person financial savings of greater than $100 million final yr.
The well being care system mentioned its new pharmacy hub additionally will permit it to cross alongside efficiencies and drug financial savings to sufferers. The acquisition of bigger portions of medicine additionally can be doable, stopping shortages that might hold sufferers from sticking to their treatment orders.
“We knew we had been seeing hovering pharmaceutical prices, and we all know there was a scarcity of pharmaceutical medication,” mentioned Buck Stanford, vice chairman and chief pharmacy officer at IU Well being. “And we knew it was an issue that wasn’t going away anytime quickly.”
Ramping up
The ability value greater than $30 million to construct and equip. The hospital system mentioned it expects to recoup that value by financial savings and efficiencies over 5 to 10 years.
The objective is to permit IU Well being, the biggest hospital system in Indiana, to get extra management over its drug provides and prices. The system spends tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} a yr on prescription drugs, making it certainly one of its prime bills, together with wages, advantages and different provides.
It has been ramping up the massive operation for months and just lately held an open home. It’s the biggest central pharmacy for a hospital system in Indiana, with about 85 staff. It plans to broaden that to about 180 inside three years.
Throughout the US, practically half of all hospital methods had been contemplating establishing centralized distribution, attracted by the potential of better financial savings and supply-chain management, in accordance with a 2019 survey by Swisslog Healthcare.
In recent times, some giant U.S. hospital methods have moved on this course. Final yr, Baptist Well being spent $40 million to construct a 90,000-square-foot pharmacy hub in LaGrange, Kentucky, to serve its 9 hospitals in Kentucky and southern Indiana. In 2021, Ascension, the St. Louis-based Catholic well being care big, spent $8 million to construct a 30,000-square-foot pharmacy hub in Austin, Texas.
“The pharmacy is an ecosystem,” Scott Spille, pharmacy working officer for Ascension Rx, informed the Austin American-Stateman when the hub opened in June 2021. “It doesn’t simply begin and cease.”
Some pharmacy specialists applaud IU Well being and different well being methods which might be centralizing their pharmacy operations. They are saying it improves effectivity and affected person security.
“Whenever you’re placing your distribution in a centralized facility, you’re in a position to have the workers there focus extra on making certain it’s the appropriate drug, it’s made appropriately,” mentioned Veronica Vernon, assistant professor of pharmacy follow at Butler College and previous president of the Indiana Pharmacy Affiliation. “And so central-size services really enhance affected person security with reference to lowering treatment errors.”
A rising pattern
It’s unclear whether or not some other hospital system in central Indiana is contemplating an analogous transfer. Franciscan Well being Indianapolis declined to remark, and Ascension St. Vincent didn’t reply.
Neighborhood Well being Community mentioned it has “centralized stock” for its six hospitals and scores of clinics at its East Hospital campus on North Ritter Avenue.
The hospital system didn’t present the sq. footage of the power however mentioned it’s not a warehouse.
“It’s a giant storage room,” mentioned Daybreak Moore, Neighborhood’s chief pharmacy officer. “We now have a separate space for that function. It’s not like our hospital operations pharmacy. It’s a separate location the place we conduct that service.”
She added that massive pharmacy hubs are costly and that hospital methods want to research in depthto be certain that they repay.
“You don’t centralize simply to centralize as a result of you may,” Moore mentioned. “The return on funding must be good—and never only for getting cash, however what are the financial savings? Or what efficiencies are you going to appreciate?”
In the meantime, nationwide on-line and mail-order providers, comparable to Amazon, are pushing into the nation’s $400 billion pharmacy market. 5 years in the past, Amazon purchased PillPack, a web based pharmacy that fills prescriptions and ships medication packaged in presorted doses. Amazon has used the PillPack acquisition to get a foothold within the business—and construct on it.
Large pharmacy distribution facilities are nothing new. St. Louis-based Categorical Scripts operates a 340,000-square-foot pharmacy distribution heart in Whitestown. The corporate grew to become the biggest mail-order distributor when it purchased Medco Well being Options Inc. in 2012.
IU Well being’s pharmacy hub, although it’s cavernous, shouldn’t be a freestanding constructing. The well being system carved the area out of its current, 300,000-square-foot provide warehouse, known as an “built-in service heart,” close to the Indianapolis Worldwide Airport.
IU Well being opened the warehouse in 2018 in an effort to standardize stock and order in bulk at a reduction.
The pharmacy part of the large constructing is provided with a number of layers of safety, together with a guard on the door and badge entry to workplaces and rooms.
The pharmacy hub has been within the planning levels practically three years. Building started through the pandemic and just lately was accomplished. (IBJ picture/Eric Discovered)
Rising capability
A centerpiece to the operation is a central line that fills as much as 5,000 prescriptions in an eight-hour shift, together with labeling and counting all capsule orders. Lots of the orders are then delivered on to sufferers’ houses or to the hospitals’ retail pharmacies.
Beforehand, all prescription orders had been crammed by hand, at a tempo of just one,000 prescriptions per eight-hour shift, IU Well being mentioned. Within the giant room, a sequence of lengthy conveyor belts shuttled blue plastic totes, whereas a sequence of robots grabbed medicines from bins or cabinets. A bunch of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians monitored the method.
On a latest day, the central fill line was working at low quantity, however officers mentioned they anticipated it to choose up as quickly because the operation went into excessive gear.
“I haven’t actually seen this factor be capable to actually flex its muscle mass, however August can be spectacular to see what it may well do,” mentioned Shelby Koonce, a central fill pharmacist with IU Well being.
One other main characteristic of the pharmacy hub is a robotic drug storage system designed to retailer, retrieve and management stock. Molly Inexperienced, supervisor of distribution operations, demonstrated by tapping the identify of a drug onto a contact display at her station. Within the stacks, a robotic with lengthy extension arms reached greater than 15 toes excessive to retrieve the medication and drop them right into a drawer at waist degree.
“The good factor about that is, I’m not strolling round in every single place attempting to assemble issues,” Inexperienced mentioned, as she opened the drawer and inspected a small field of medicines inside.
IU Well being is already speaking about utilizing drones to make chosen deliveries or to get provides from one location to a different.
“It’s on our street map,” Stanford mentioned. “I might say for us actually utilizing drones, we’re most likely three or 4 years out.”
The IU Well being pharmacy hub is designed to free pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to spend extra time in direct affected person care, relieving them of doing repetitive “manufacturing work,” comparable to compounding.
All 16 IU Well being hospitals will proceed to have pharmacies in home, however a few of them would possibly get smaller as stock is centralized on the hub.
Stanford mentioned the pharmacy hub has been within the planning levels for practically three years. Building started through the pandemic and just lately was accomplished.
The ability will assist pharmaceutical buying, in addition to distribution for all hospitals and clinics, pressing care facilities, house well being, house infusion, and retail and inpatient pharmacies.
Already, IU Well being mentioned, it has chalked up some wins. Within the pharmacy hub’s compounding heart, the place pharmacy technicians combine substances collectively to create a drugs tailor-made to a affected person’s wants, staff had been in a position to fill an pressing particular order of a drug for a younger affected person at Riley Hospital for Kids inside a number of hours.
IU Well being was additionally in a position to purchase medication in bigger bulk portions by the hub, together with an antibiotic ceaselessly utilized by docs and nurses that the system beforehand purchased because it wanted.
“We had been in a position to do some forecasting of what we would wish over the following six to 12 months,” Stanford mentioned. “We had been in a position to save about 50% of what would have been the per-unit value.”
Story Continues Beneath