Drug Shortages through the Decades: A Big-Picture Perspective

Abstract

ospital pharmacy has enjoyed a long relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. In the late 1960s and 1970s, hospital pharmacists championed the development of group purchasing organizations (GPOs), pooling the purchasing power of individual institutions into larger, but still manageable, groups of hospitals. The GPOs developed reliable strategies for establishing the quantities of each pharmaceutical product that the group would purchase. Hospital pharmacy departments monitored inventory turns and minimized holding costs before this approach became the norm in the health care industry. Negotiations with industry were based on positive supplier