Becker's Hospital Review: How Texas Children’s cut pharmacy inventory costs by $14M

For years, pharmacy inventory management at Houston-based Texas Children’s relied on a process familiar to many health systems: manual counts, visual inspections and a significant amount of guesswork.

Technicians routinely counted inventory across the health system’s 13 pharmacy satellite locations, checked expiration dates and reordered medications based on what appeared to be missing from a bin. During a drug shortage, teams often had to physically search multiple locations to determine how much inventory was actually available.

“We know what we’ve dispensed, but we sometimes didn’t even know what we really had on hand because it was a very manual process,” Jeff Wagner, PharmD, vice president of pharmacy operations at Texas Children’s, told Becker’s.

To address those challenges, Texas Children’s implemented radio-frequency identification-enabled inventory tracking technology that provides near real-time visibility into high-cost medications across pharmacy operations.