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Shortage of pharmacy technicians persists in 2023 — here’s how to streamline and adapt your operations

The shortage of pharmacy technicians is straining pharmacies across the nation, with seemingly no end in sight to the dearth of qualified workers. In fact, vacancy rates have climbed to over 20% from 6% on average, with 10% of hospital pharmacies reporting they’ve lost up to 40% of their techs.

The unfortunate reality for hospital pharmacies is that plenty of drugs end up in the trash when they expire before they can be dispensed. Of course, that’s wasteful and costly, but deemed necessary by the FDA to protect patient safety.

New program enables health systems a more strategic approach to reducing drug spend and building system-wide supply chain solutions

Columbus, Ohio – Dec. 1, 2022 – Safecor Health today announced SafecorLogics, a new program for health systems to reduce drug spend, build system-wide supply chain solutions and improve value-based care. SafecorLogics allows a health system to consolidate order volume across numerous hospitals and store packaged product in Safecor Health’s warehouses. Combined with Safecor Health’s drug spend analysis, SafecorLogics drives standardization and significant reduction in drug and packaging costs across multi-site and multi-state facilities.

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The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) released its 2020–2021 Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Hospitals in late February of 2020. These best practices focus on trying to solve specific medication issues that can cause harmful errors for patients.

Considering a rewarding career at Safecor Health?

Safecor Health is growing and we're looking for talented individuals to join our teams in Columbus, Ohio, and Woburn, Massachusetts. If you were considering a meaningful career in healthcare, Safecor could be the right match for you. Not convinced? Let us share the top 5 things you should know about working at Safecor Health:

A contract packager is a company that packages and labels products for clients. In the healthcare space, pharmaceutical contract packaging solutions help drug manufacturers, wholesalers, telehealth companies and GPOs bring new products to market while still managing the packaging needs of existing products within their portfolio.

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Weighing the option of purchasing a unit-dose packaging system for your hospital pharmacy versus outsourcing your packaging

Hospitals continually look for ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency, and unit-dose drug repackaging and barcoding remain an option to achieve that. While some hospital pharmacies have the resources to manage drug repackaging in-house, for others, the time, space, and labor requirements remain a constant challenge. As a result, many hospital pharmacies are opting to outsource their unit-dose repackaging, allowing them to free up staff time, space and significantly reduce costs. So which option is best for your pharmacy – investing in packaging equipment and packaging in-house or outsourcing to a third-party unit-dose repackager? 

Originally posted on April 05, 2018

Updated August 2, 2021 

While the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to medication shortages, the FDA acknowledges that drug shortages can occur almost any time, due to factors such as manufacturing delays, quality issues, or discontinuations. In fact, the FDA now offers a Drug Shortages Mobile App to receive notifications within selected therapeutic categories.

As a result of pandemic-related shortages, some hospitals and health systems have opted to establish a combination of in-house and outsourced unit-dose drug repackaging to ensure supply availability and to keep costs in check. Regardless of which approach a facility chooses, cross-contamination remains a vitally important consideration for every hospital's unit-dose repackaging strategy.