Managing Medication Shortage on WIHI

Managing Medication Shortage: Best Practices for a Crisis​
September 22, 2011, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern Time

Guests:
Lynn Eschenbacher, PharmD, MBA, Assistant Director of Clinical Services, WakeMed Health & Hospitals

Michael R. Cohen, RPh, MS, ScD (hon.), DPS (hon.), President, The Institute for Safe Medication Practices

Frank Federico, RPh, Executive Director, Strategic Partners, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)

Medication safety has gotten a lot more challenging in the past year or so, due to circumstances health care providers can’t typically predict or control: a growing, critical shortage of prescription drugs, hundreds of them, including mainstay generics hospitals use to treat several forms of cancer. News organizations have begun to pay attention to the trend because of the tough decisions providers and patients now face when preferred treatments for certain types of aggressive leukemia or testicular cancer aren’t available. A recent story on The PBS NewsHour offers one of the more comprehensive looks at the underlying industry practices, product decisions, and manufacturing problems that have led to the crisis—a crisis that’s enabled a gray market to now traffic in scarce supplies of certain drugs in order to offer them for sale at astronomically higher prices.

Against this backdrop, and while policy makers, members of Congress, and the US Food and Drug Administration seek both short-term and longer-term solutions, hospitals have no choice but to develop strategies and best practices that assume, for now, prescription drug shortages. WIHI is pleased to welcome three people to the September 22 program who have their fingers on the pulse of what’s going on and are actively working to help organizations effectively manage a complex situation. IHI’s Frank Federico, the ISMP’s Michael Cohen, and WakeMed’s Lynn Eschenbacher are three pharmacy-trained improvers who’ve tapped their expertise on medication safety to come up with new strategies that can enable hospital staff to stay on top of the fast-moving drug shortage problem on a daily basis. WIHI host Madge Kaplan can’t think of a better moment to benefit from their knowledge and to learn how Lynn Eschenbacher’s hospital system in particular is effectively dealing with the crisis.

In addition to viewing the PBS broadcast, in preparation for the Sept 22 WIHI we invite you to read a new article in Healthcare Executive about the drug shortages, written by Frank Federico, Bona Benjamin, and Michael Cohen. We’d also like to draw your attention to a Premier healthcare alliance analysis of the gray market, which provides critical facts and guidance for hospital pharmacists and staff who purchase prescriptions.

We look forward to your participation on this next WIHI, and we hope you’ll encourage any of your colleagues who are trying to better understand and manage the drug shortage situation to join us as well. Thanks!

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