Hospital pharmacies manage critical medications, from high-value specialty drugs to life-saving compounded treatments. Yet, ensuring precise inventory oversight across dynamic environments like surgical suites, clean rooms, and infusion centers remains a challenge.

In Bluesight’s recent webinar, “Think Outside the Box with RFID,” TJ Bozada, KitCheck Product Manager, and Jeff Hadden, Pharmacy Team Coordinator at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, explored these challenges and introduced KitCheck Anywhere, an innovative RFID-powered solution.

The Challenge: Limited Oversight into Critical Inventory 

Hospital pharmacies operate in environments where inefficiencies can have far-reaching consequences:

• Fast expiring and fast moving drugs can cause stockouts that delay patient care and reduce revenue. Overstocking this inventory leads to a high cost of expirations.
• High-cost inventory left unmonitored can lead to high-cost waste, even due to one unit expiring or going missing. 
• Commonly diverted medications – such as Botox®, inhalers, insulin or GLP1s – prove that it’s not just controlled medications that require oversight.
• Hazardous medications require inventory management workflows that are high-risk to staff safety

Traditional inventory tools rely on manual tracking, leading to recurring issues like stockouts, delayed care, waste, and diversion. At best, these issues drain time and resources. At worst, they create risks that jeopardize quality patient care and safety of both patients and staff. As Bozada noted, “There are a lot of places in the health system that require manual decrementing, and that dependency leads to recurring problems.”

A New Solution: KitCheck Anywhere 

KitCheck Anywhere extends the capabilities of RFID technology to deliver real-time visibility into medication inventory wherever it’s already stored – whether in refrigerators, in cabinets, or on open shelving. Here’s how it works:

• Modular RFID Hardware: Seamlessly integrates into current storage.
• Real-Time Dashboard: Tracks stock levels, expiration dates, and temperature excursions.
• Actionable Insights: Identifies stock gaps, prevents expirations, and mitigates diversion risks.

Bozada explained, “There’s no need to replace your existing refrigerator. Just install these shelf-liners and gain real-time visibility.”

Case Study 1: Compounded Medications for the Cardiac OR

Previously, compounded medications for the Cardiac OR were kept unrefrigerated in a cart, resulting in reduced shelf lives – just 2-3 days instead of the intended 9-10 days. This led to frequent stockouts, procedure delays, and an annual expiration cost of over $70,000. 

Rather than purchasing an Automated Dispensing Cabinet (ADC), KitCheck Anywhere was added to a single refrigerator in the Cardiac OR. This enabled real-time tracking, resulting in an immediate 86% reduction in expirations, zero stockouts or delayed procedures, and $49,000 in annualized savings.

Case Study 2: Hazardous Sterile Compounding 

Pharmacy staff often entered the hazardous clean room just to validate inventory levels, costing significant time and exposing them to health hazards. However, the only way to account for nearly $400,000 worth of high-value inventory was to take the time to don PPE, enter the clean room, and manually cycle count. 

RFID shelf liners were installed into hazardous medication refrigerators, providing precise, remote visibility into stock levels and expiration dates. Not only did this reduce the required entries into the room, but the hospital has also been able to reallocate the soon-to-expire inventory to sister hospitals and ensure no unit goes to waste. This has led to zero expirations since installation, which has safeguarded against high cost of waste. 

“Most hospitals will have this kind of situation where they have that refrigerator in a space that’s not easy to get to quickly,” Hadden explained. “Now, instead of actually entering the hazardous room and garbing up, we can scan KitCheck and realize in real time what medications we have in that refrigerator. There’s a number of benefits there.”

Highlighted Q&A with Jeff Hadden, PharmD

Q: How did you find value in keeping your existing hardware (i.e., fridge) instead of replacing equipment?

Jeff: For the cardiac OR, it was particularly valuable that instead of investing in an ADC, we could instead purchase a somewhat inexpensive refrigerator and retrofit it with KitCheck hardware. For us, this meant less upfront budget, no ADC maintenance, extended shelf life of the compounded medications, and instant visibility to our inventory without the 25-minute roundtrip to the cardiac OR suite each time.

It’s similar for the hazardous medication fridge. We no longer have to take all that time to “garb up” in the required protective apparel, and look in the fridge – it’s simply the click of a button now. 

Q: Walk us through the day to day workflow while using this technology.

Jeff:  In the cardiac OR area, check the scan of the refrigerator twice a day – once in the overnight shift and again in the early afternoon. Because of the small size of the fridge we will typically replenish the inventory twice daily, bringing the precise inventory needed according to the scan. It’s also convenient that, as opposed to an ADC, there’s no login information and everything is tracked through the data in the tags. It’s a similar process for the hazardous medication refrigerator, but we typically view the scans just once a day to ensure we have everything we need for the next day’s cases, and re-order what has been used. 

Q: Outside of the benefits for Pharmacy, what other departments have benefited from this technology?

Jeff: We’ve gotten positive feedback from the staff working in the Cardiac OR. They love it – they feel like they have everything they need at their fingertips. 

Q: Can you elaborate on how this supports shortage mitigation?

Jeff: Oftentimes, counts from other workflows aren’t 100% correct. For example, you may read that your ADC says you have five units of an item but in reality, you might only have two. When something is on shortage it’s important to know the exact quantity you have versus guessing based on potentially inaccurate numbers. With KitCheck Anywhere, it’s a lot easier to manage a shortage because you have the full picture. 

Q: What motivates Sentara to be involved in pilots and be an early adopter of new technology?

Jeff: It’s intriguing for us. We have found that some of our challenges cannot be solved through traditional solutions. So, we’re motivated to see what other methods could fix our problems or simply make our processes better. Plus, I like to be in the front row – helping build new ways to solve our challenges and make things better for both our patients and our staff. 

Q: What is the #1 way in which this has impacted your hospital?

Jeff: Making sure that the providers have what they need for their patients. That was the biggest hurdle we faced and the top problem we needed to solve in the first place. Especially given the fact that the cardiac OR suite is far from the pharmacy, it’s huge that we solved that problem and now ensure that providers have what they need and have an accurate means of determining what needs to be replaced and when it’s expiring. 

Q: Can you share other use cases that you see as valuable for your hospital or health system?

Jeff: Most of our time and energy has been focused on the kind of use cases that we covered here, refrigerated inventory, high dollar inventory, whether that’s within a main hospital or whether that’s in a clinic. I think small sites that may not have the means to buy ADC cabinets could definitely benefit from using KitCheck Anywhere for adding oversight to any expensive medications, especially to make sure that anything soon-to-expire can be used before it needs to be wasted. 

TJ: There’s a lot of inventory outside of the four walls of the hospital that matters. For example, we’ve had discussions with health systems about using this for the vaccines kept in clinics. What has also been interesting is having some discussions with hospitals where their top problem isn’t actually medication. I spoke with a health system recently that has a lot of hernia mesh inventory and is expiring $50k worth of inventory each month. We’re still exploring more use cases with health systems, and so far we’re hearing a lot of ideas pop up and health systems sharing half million dollar problems that they want help with. 

Learn more about KitCheck Anywhere.