The Work Behind Every Dose

By Valerie Bandy, PharmD, Vice President, Pharmacy Solutions

A pharmacist starts the morning with the shortage list. By ten, a technician has recounted a cabinet drawer that doesn’t match the system, a buyer is calling a second wholesaler for a drug that’s backordered everywhere, and a prescriber is waiting on a safe alternative. None of it will appear in a patient’s chart as pharmacy work. All of it is the reason the medication shows up on time and the dose is right.

I learned how little of that work gets seen when I left one of my first pharmacy director roles. The pharmacist who took over told me they had no idea what the job involved, and that they had a much greater respect for everything we did on the team’s behalf. Most of pharmacy continues to work that way, and National Pharmacy Week is a good time to recognize the people helping keep patient care and treatment going.

The work grew faster than the support around it

Pharmacy now covers sterile compounding, medication safety, regulatory readiness, contracting and shortage response, and the list of specialties keeps growing. Pharmacists round with physicians and adjust therapy under clinical protocols. They are among the most trusted people in a hospital.

The support around them hasn’t kept pace. In our survey earlier this year, 48% of pharmacy and supply chain leaders called their function strategic, and only 15% of hospital executives agreed. The people doing the work feel that gap most in their daily hours.

Where the hours go

Pharmacists train for years to help patients get the most from their medications. Too many of their hours go instead to hand counts, phone calls, spreadsheets and hunting for where a drug is stored. Only 20% of the leaders we surveyed have full, real-time visibility into inventory across care settings, so most teams cover the gap with extra hours. And oftentimes, there aren’t extra hours available in the day.

Pharmacy teams across the health systems we work with, Texas Children’s Hospital among them, have shown how much time comes back when manual steps leave the day.

I think this is where AI will do the most good for pharmacists and is something we’re working on closely for them. Much of their work follows a standard pattern, such as tracking when a drug is likely to run short, flagging stock that will expire before anyone uses it and reconciling counts across locations. AI can help manage that work and bring the pharmacist a recommendation in place of a spreadsheet. It depends on accurate, connected data, so the basics still matter. The pharmacist makes the decision, and the time saved goes to patient conversations and clinical judgment.

Thank you

To the pharmacists, technicians, buyers, residents and pharmacy leaders reading this, thank you. Hospitals run on work most people never see, and yours is a large part of it. Happy National Pharmacy Week.