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ALGORITHM TO DEVELOP AN ESSENTIAL DRUG LIST
European Statement
Selection, Procurement and Distribution
Author(s)
Kim Florian Green, Torsten Hoppe-Tichy
Why was it done?
Drug shortages are an increasing problem for hospitals in Germany. The management is time consuming and might endanger safety of drug therapy. Therefore, it is essential to take precautions to deal with upcoming shortages in advance.
What was done?
Development of an algorithm to create an essential drug list in consideration of logistic and clinical aspects.
How was it done?
The first step was classification of the hospital formulary. We used 4 types for classification (oral medication, parenteral medication, medicinal products, and dietetics). Following a priorisation for parenteral and oral drugs cause of the fact we discovered in an internal benchmark that durgshortages with parenteral drugs lead to a larger workload. After that we assessed drug consumption for each drug by year, quarter and month and conducted an extending selective inventory control (ABC-XYZ-Analysis).
Next step was to create a step-by-step decision-tree considering local clinical pathways and logistics define essential drugs. The algorithm displays typical procurement processes and infrastructure in German hospitals pharmacies and the common search for alternative drug therapies.
What has been achieved?
The combination of the algorithm and the ABC-XYZ-Analysis lead to an individual list of essential drugs and allows to define logistic measures for each of them.
What next?
The list allows us to define an adequate stock for upcoming drugshortages. Internal benchmarking for process robustness. External validation of our algorithm is necessary.