Future of Pharmacy Podcast: Planning Your Journey to an Autonomous Pharmacy

Jennifer Tryon, PharmD, MS, FASHP
Associate Vice President and Chief Pharmacy Officer, Wake Forest Baptist Health

Every day, the healthcare industry faces new challenges that are impeding goals to deliver quality patient care. The stress of managing more complex systems in the face of higher expectations continues to grow.

In fact, a recent study from the National Academy of Medicine reports that 54% of clinicians are reporting some level of burn out. And that study was before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

The need for a safer, more efficient, and less expensive approach to medication management is long overdue. 

In the premier episode of Omnicell’s The Future of Pharmacy Podcast, I join Omnicell’s Jim Stevenson, Vice President of Medication System Strategy, and host Ken Perez, to discuss the opportunity of Autonomous Pharmacy to help us achieve our patient care goals.

In the podcast, we talk about the urgent need for hospitals to have interoperability across their pharmacy systems. The integration of systems enhances visibility of inventory and medication and empowers hospitals to streamline workflows, achieve closed-loop reporting, reduces medication errors, limits diversion risks, lowers costs and improves patient care.

Pharmacists and nurses working without integrated solutions will tell you the operational blind spots caused by disconnected, siloed systems, compounded by the delays and errors caused by outdated manual workflows, lead to incomplete and incorrect medication data, sub-optimal inventory management, drug shortages, and ever-present diversion risks and financial strains that plague pharmacies.

Today’s pharmacy is driven by manual, time-consuming tasks — working on reports, mostly looking at limited visibility from historic information. The Autonomous Pharmacy, on the other hand, means applying connected automation and integrated data intelligence, throughout the medication use and care delivery process, allowing us to refocus our time to more impactful, clinical activities.

Jim and I discuss how the Autonomous Pharmacy Advisory Board, which I chair, built out a framework that makes it easier for you to understand and plan your progression to a digital transformation to improve value-based care, safety, efficiency compliance and reduce operating cost.

To learn more about the layers and five core components of the Autonomous Pharmacy Framework, listen to this podcast.

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company. Assumptions made in the analysis are not reflective of the position of any entity other than the author(s). These views are always subject to change, revision, and rethinking at any time and may not be held in perpetuity.