Impact of a systematic framework for anticipatory compounding on medication waste reduction in a mid-size community hospital.

Abstract

In current hospital pharmacy practice, the need to compound medications ahead of patient orders often results in an increase in medication waste. The purpose of this study was to implement a strategic approach for anticipatory sterile compounding and evaluate its effect on the reduction of expired medication waste. This was a pre-/post-intervention quasi-experimental study with 3 weeks of data collection for both arms and a 1-week washout period to implement process changes. A par log was placed on the medication storage refrigerator used for anticipatory compounding, with minimum and maximum levels determined by the demand-forecasting model. The primary outcome was the percentage of observations associated with waste. The secondary outcomes were the overall percentage of sterile compounding spending attributable to waste, median wasted dollars per sterile compounded product, and median dollars spent per sterile product compounded as anticipatory stock. Descriptive statistics were calculated using Minitab version 20, with the α level set to 0.05. A total of 4,619 observations were included in the analysis: 2,433 in the preintervention group and 2,186 in the postintervention group. Despite the median price being higher in the postintervention group than in the preintervention group, both the primary and secondary outcomes indicated that waste was reduced following the intervention. Overall, implementation of the framework reduced sterile products waste at our institution. More research is needed to evaluate the effects of this framework at institutions of different sizes and with different patient populations. Further research on probabilistic models for sterile compounded products is also needed.