Hospital costs reduction after implementation of informatized tools in the logistics of a hospital pharmacy service

Abstract

The hospital pharmacy is currently a hospital unit that has, among other objectives, to guarantee the safe and rational use of drugs and to provide for the demands of inpatients; for such, it must have an efficient information system and have a cost control and monitoring system. The various technological innovations in information and data control applied to health services bring agility to the process, greater security for patients, and better management in the logistics process, reducing costs such as those associated with the expiration of product shelf life. In this perspective of cost analysis, the present study evaluates the impacts that a traceability informatization process and the use of informatized tools provided to a hospital pharmacy service with the objective of describing the financial impacts after the implementation of the process. We conducted an observational, longitudinal and retrospective study from financial data related to expiration losses of medicines and health products and emergency supplies purchases over a six-year period. The data was collected in December 2021 for the years 2015 to 2020 from reports extracted from Smart (Pixeon). We note that health product expiration loss costs fell substantially in 2019, with the lowest cost in 2020, corresponding to an average reduction of 47.9% in these last two years from the previous four-year average. There has also been an almost 70% reduction in emergency purchasing costs over this period. Thus, when we evaluate these results, it can be seen that the informatization of traceability and the use of informatized tools to support the logistical work process can contribute significantly to reducing hospital costs.