Hospital pharmacies are managing inventory across the central pharmacy, ORs, clinics, infusion centers, satellite pharmacies, and more. During a supply disruption, the gaps between systems are where the real risk lives. A hospital pharmacy team responding to a shortage today typically starts with its automated dispensing cabinets, carousels, and other pharmacy automation data to understand what it has on hand. What that view has been missing, until now, is everything tracked with RFID – the bins, kits, trays, fridges, and shelves that make up a meaningful share of total medication supply.
KitCheck and KitCheck Anywhere inventory data is now available within ShortageCheck, giving pharmacy and supply chain teams a single, consolidated view of inventory across pharmacy automation and RFID-tracked inventory.
The problem with a partial inventory picture
ShortageCheck has always used pharmacy automation data, including automated dispensing cabinets and carousels, to calculate days on hand, usage rates, and shortage risk. That data is essential, but it is not the whole story. RFID-tagged inventory managed through KitCheck, including kits, trays, bins, and the expanding footprint of KitCheck Anywhere across fridges and cabinets in decentralized care settings, has historically lived outside that view.
For a pharmacy or supply chain team, that separation creates real work. During a shortage or supply disruption, teams are often left manually cross-referencing inventory against everything else in the building to understand true supply. Or, when that step is skipped, it can also produce false urgency and unneeded emergency purchases.
One number, with a more complete inventory view
With this integration, ShortageCheck ingests KitCheck and KitCheck Anywhere inventory data directly, including total units, days-on-hand calculations, and monthly usage rates, and incorporates it into the same shortage planning workflows teams already use. RFID-tagged inventory now appears alongside pharmacy automation data rather than in a separate system, and teams can see it broken out by location and storage type, including kits, trays, bins, fridges, and shelves, as well as rolled up into a single system-wide total.
Better shortage planning
Nearly 500 hospitals are already tracking shortage segments within KitCheck today, spanning almost 4,000 segments system-wide, using temporary PARs and acceptable alternatives to manage supply risk.
A more complete inventory picture changes three things for a pharmacy team managing a disruption:
- Teams get a clearer, more accurate view of exactly what they have, at which site and system-wide, instead of estimating based on partial data.
- More complete inventory data also means more accurate shortage planning, which reduces the odds of a panic purchase or false urgency driven by inventory that simply was not visible.
- And because KitCheck’s RFID coverage extends into clinics, infusion centers, and ORs through KitCheck Anywhere, every new deployment expands the inventory picture ShortageCheck can plan against, particularly for the critical, high-value, and fast-moving medications that live in those decentralized settings.
KitCheck’s RFID-based medication tracking is used by 1,000+ hospitals, making it the leading RFID inventory solution in the market. Bringing that inventory directly into ShortageCheck’s shortage management workflow is a meaningful step toward ShortageCheck functioning as a more holistic inventory tool, one that shows not just how much a hospital has, but how fast it is using it and how much it will need.
To learn more about the integration of KitCheck and ShortageCheck check out the 3-minute on-demand demo video.