This session features a panel of leaders who will share their experiences and methods to successfully reduce waste within the health care system to drive greater efficiencies.

How do you quantify medication waste? Drugs that expire before use? What about compounded products? Static inventory in your pharmacies and automated dispensing cabinets? Excessive and unnecessary medication spend? At UCSF, we developed a dashboard that compiles all medication waste and medication inventory opportunities to showcase cost avoidance and direct cost savings. This is normalized per patient day and compares month to month and fiscal year to fiscal year.

In response to excessive medication wastage, Texas Children’s Hospital sought to replace metrics such as, “I feel like we need this medication,” or “This is what we usually use,” with metrics such as actual, predictive and adjustable usage. The team developed an innovative predictive ordering technology to help us be more efficient and accurate in the medication we keep on our shelves — reducing the volumes of medication ordered and returned without a single instance where operations had to go without medication for patient care.

Join this session to learn new methods to reduce waste in health care.