From Bottlenecks to Breakthroughs

LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY TO OPTIMIZE PHARMACY WORKFLOWS

Exploring the Impact of Network Platforms and Digitalization on the End-to-End Healthcare Supply Chain

The Central Role of Pharmacy Professionals in Healthcare

In the realm of healthcare, pharmacy teams stand as crucial contributors whose primary goal is to improve patients’ lives through optimal medication management. They act as vital intermediaries, ensuring patients receive the correct medications, are protected from potentially harmful ones, and can gain access to the products they need at the right time. These professionals offer more than mere dispensing of drugs; they provide invaluable clinical expertise, collaborate with other healthcare professionals in comprehensive treatment planning, and play a pivotal role in patient education, particularly in areas where treatment knowledge is lacking.

In their critical role, however, pharmacy teams are often hampered by manual, time-consuming processes that divert their attention from patient care. Tasks such as manually tracking medication inventories, processing drug recalls, and managing shortages require extensive coordination across disparate systems, reducing efficiency and limiting their ability to provide timely interventions. These administrative burdens, compounded by the need for constant communication with suppliers and healthcare providers, leave pharmacy teams with less time to apply their clinical expertise, collaborate in treatment planning, and educate patients. This reactive approach not only strains their workflow but also hinders their capacity to fully contribute to optimal patient outcomes.

Supply chain digitalization offers a powerful solution to these challenges by automating and integrating the various processes that currently burden pharmacy staff.

By streamlining time consuming administrative tasks and improving supply chain visibility through end-to-end healthcare supply chain digitalization, pharmacy personnel are able to free up valuable time, allowing them to focus more on direct patient care and personalized health outcomes. This comprehensive approach underscores their commitment to maintaining the highest quality, safety, and integrity standards in patient care.

The Modern Challenges of the Healthcare Supply Chain

Today’s healthcare supply chain faces numerous challenges, including frequent drug recalls, shortages, and the increasing complexity of compliance regulations. Managing recalls often requires manual tracking across multiple systems and locations, while shortages force pharmacies to continuously communicate with suppliers and find alternatives, leading to delays in patient care. Compliance adds further strain as pharmacies must adhere to evolving regulations, increasing the risk of errors and operational slowdowns.

These challenges also contribute to labor shortages as the growing complexity of supply chain management leads to burnout and higher turnover. In addition, these inefficiencies drive escalating costs, with pharmacies dedicating significant resources to managing shortages, recalls, and compliance. This strain ultimately impacts patients by delaying care.

Gaining full visibility into the healthcare supply chain is another key challenge. Full visibility is essential for ensuring product availability, safety and compliance. It allows healthcare organizations to track and authenticate products in real time, reducing the risk of counterfeiting and ensuring regulatory compliance. With better visibility, organizations can prevent shortages by monitoring inventory levels and managing demand proactively, while also optimizing stock to minimize waste. This transparency enables quicker responses to disruptions, enhances collaboration across the supply chain, and ultimately improves patient care by ensuring timely access to critical medicines and supplies.

However, gaining full visibility into the healthcare supply chain is challenging due to fragmented systems where different stakeholders use incompatible technologies, and data silos prevent seamless information sharing. Complex regulatory requirements, like DSCSA compliance, add further complexity, as tracking and tracing medications involve multiple layers of oversight. Additionally, global dependencies create logistical barriers, such as varying standards across borders, making it difficult to monitor products in real time.

The Downstream Impact on Pharmacies and Patient Care

The healthcare supply chain is often trapped in a reactive and manual mode of operation due to its reliance on outdated systems and fragmented processes. Pharmacies typically depend on manual processes to enter data into inventory management systems, causing outdated demand and supply plans. This slows decision-making and causes inefficiencies like stockouts, delayed shipments, and inventory imbalances, which are often only addressed after they occur. Without integrated, automated, data-sharing systems across the supply chain, pharmacies frequently react to emergencies — such as medication shortages — rather than anticipate and prevent them. As a result, costly last-minute orders or overstocking of less urgent medications occurs, leading to waste and increases in working capital.

These supply chain breakdowns have a significant downstream impact on pharmacies and patient care. As pharmacies struggle to manage inventory, respond to shortages, and ensure timely medication availability, patients often experience delays in treatment due to stockouts or unavailability of critical drugs. Pharmacy professionals, who are crucial to patient safety and care, are increasingly burdened with administrative tasks like managing recalls and sourcing alternative medications, pulling them away from their primary responsibilities of medication counseling and personalized care. This reactive approach impacts the overall quality of care, as pharmacy teams have less time to focus on patient outcomes.

Furthermore, these supply chain challenges drive higher operational costs, which can trickle down to patients in the form of increased cost of care. In severe cases, limited access to essential medications during shortages can worsen patient health outcomes.

The combination of manual, fragmented supply chain processes and their downstream effects creates a domino effect, disrupting pharmacy operations and directly affecting patient care and safety. Addressing these challenges requires the adoption of digital solutions, including multi-enterprise network platforms, to enhance visibility, automate processes, and improve the responsiveness of the healthcare supply chain, ultimately allowing pharmacy teams to refocus on delivering high-quality patient care.

Digitalization and Network Models: The Future of the Healthcare Industry

The shift towards a digitalized supply chain has been hindered by the inability to link systems and processes across the supply chain and maintain those links cost effectively. However, compliance regulations such as the DSCSA have created opportunities to create digital twins of medicines and digitalize supply chain processes. However, current methods for supply chain data exchange using point-to-point integration models have proven to be too costly and fragile, which has led to a reliance on manual and paper-based solutions. Additionally, the lack of uniform data standards and real-time visibility makes it difficult to respond quickly to disruptions, while the rigid nature of the model hinders flexibility and adaptation to new technologies or changing business needs. Overall, the point-to-point model is costly and inefficient, particularly in complex sectors like healthcare, where seamless collaboration and real-time data are essential  for success.

It’s time for the healthcare supply chain to move away from a point-to-point model and adopt a multi-enterprise network platform. This is a powerful digital ecosystem that connects various stakeholders, including manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, healthcare providers, and regulatory bodies, on a unified platform. This network enables seamless data sharing and collaboration across all participants in the supply chain, which is essential for ensuring the timely and efficient production, distribution, and delivery of pharmaceutical products — and improved patient care. When the unified platform is combined with a network-wide data model, the result is a clean and actionable data set that eliminates time-consuming manual processes for data cleansing. With a clean, real-time data set, visibility is attained and intelligence and decision making is accelerated. In addition, supply chain digitalization introduces several key features that transform how businesses manage complex, multi-enterprise operations. For example, no-code design environments empower non-technical business users to configure workflows independently. This saves valuable time that can be redirected to focusing on patient care. Another example is the introduction of more robust, integrated reports and dashboards, offering complete end-to-end visibility of supply chain processes. These innovations help organizations reduce out-of-stocks, optimize inventory, and improve overall supply chain efficiency, offering new levels of transparency and collaboration and giving time and resources back to the patients.

The Imperative for a Digitized Multi-Enterprise Network in the Healthcare Industry

The healthcare industry is at a pivotal juncture where the adoption of a fully digitized, multi-enterprise network model is crucial. This model is not just a technological upgrade but a strategic necessity to mitigate the myriad risks associated with the current state of the industry. By embracing this multi-enterprise network model, the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors can effectively navigate the challenges posed by limited resources, complex operational landscapes, increasing costs, and unpredictable market dynamics.

Envision a future where pharmacy resources are seamlessly integrated into an advanced system that efficiently manages recalls and product shortages. In this system, when a recall is issued,  a notification is instantly received, but only for those products they have purchased or dispensed. This alert comes complete with detailed recall information, ready to be communicated to prescribers or patients and enriching third-party systems, eliminating the need for extra administrative effort.

Picture a scenario where pharmacy teams are proactively alerted about potential shortages, informed by their historical ordering patterns. They receive continuous, real-time updates on product statuses directly within the system, sparing them from time-consuming internet searches for alternative suppliers.

Imagine a world where safety and compliance are effortlessly maintained through technology. Counterfeit or recalled products are automatically identified and flagged before dispensation, ensuring the highest level of confidence in the medications provided. This is achieved with no requirement for manual or administrative intervention.

As technology rapidly advances, we are swiftly approaching the realization of these ideals.  The integration of sophisticated systems in pharmacy management is no longer a distant dream but an impending reality, poised to revolutionize the way pharmacy teams ensure the safety and well-being of their patients.

Conclusion and Future Outlook

In conclusion, the role of emerging technologies in transforming the pharmaceutical and healthcare supply chains is undeniable. To truly unlock their potential, the industry must transition from the outdated point-to-point data exchange model to a multi-enterprise supply chain orchestration network model. This shift brings the future closer than you think by enabling real-time visibility, seamless collaboration, and data-driven decision-making across the end-to-end supply chain. For pharmacy professionals, it’s not just about enhancing operational efficiency — it’s about ensuring optimal patient care and outcomes through proactive responses to disruptions and streamlined regulatory compliance, such as DSCSA requirements. As the industry evolves, embracing these network models and advanced technologies will be pivotal in overcoming current and future challenges, paving the way for a more advanced, efficient, and patient-centered pharmaceutical landscape. The opportunity to shape the future is at hand, and it must be pursued with foresight and commitment. 

Contributor: Dan Walles, General Manager of Traceability & Compliance, TraceLink