Drug Shortages Expose Preparedness and Data Integration Gaps in Hospital Pharmacy Operations

Valerie Bandy, PharmD, vice president of pharmacy solutions at Tecsys, explains that limited real-time visibility across pharmacy inventory and care settings remains one of the biggest constraints on hospital pharmacy and supply chain performance. According to a survey by her company, only 20% of healthcare leaders report having real-time, systemwide visibility into pharmacy inventory, and even among that group, roughly three-quarters say they are not fully prepared to manage major disruptions.

Bandy emphasizes that health systems cannot predict every disruption, but improved visibility can significantly reduce risk and improve response. The most common visibility gaps occur across multiple operational boundaries: between wholesalers and health systems; between centralized warehouses and pharmacy operations; between central pharmacies and individual hospitals or clinics; and even within hospitals themselves across inpatient, outpatient, and procedural areas. Fragmentation is especially common where different automation systems—such as automated dispensing cabinets—or standalone outpatient sites operate independently, sometimes ordering and managing inventory without central pharmacy oversight.

Because of these disconnects, many pharmacy teams operate with delayed, partial, or siloed data. Instead of integrated, real-time insight, they rely on manual reports, lagging indicators, and experience-based judgment. In today’s environment—where drug shortages, price volatility, and supply disruptions are constant—this lack of visibility forces organizations into reactive rather than proactive decision-making.

Operationally, that reactivity leads to several negative consequences. Pharmacies often discover shortages too late to respond efficiently, overorder to create buffer stock, and carry excess inventory to compensate for uncertainty. These practices increase costs and tie up resources unnecessarily. Bandy notes that without connected, cross-setting visibility, even well-intentioned preparedness efforts fall short. The result is a cycle of defensive purchasing, fragmented coordination, and elevated financial and operational strain across pharmacy supply chains.

Bandy also comments on how hospitals can better prepare for future shortages; the risks in relying on those aforementioned manual or fragmented tracking processes; and much more.

A transcript of her conversation with PC can be found below.

PC: With a majority of respondents citing drug shortages as the most disruptive factor in pharmacy operations, what operational weaknesses does this reveal, and how can hospitals better prepare for future shortages?

Bandy: The statistics that we found within the survey is that four inc five, which is equivalent to about 79%, are saying that the drug shortages are what's causing the most disruption. We agree, drug shortages definitely dominate disruption within the health system. They're so unpredictable.

Over the past 12 to 24 months, the demand spikes of about 63% and raw material shortages, about 63%, are the top factors. All those are equal, but they're the ones that are prevailing in those operations, and so this just reveals a gap in preparedness and a breakdown in the data analytics. They’re preparing for drug shortages instead of reacting to them again—like we were discussing earlier—so 77% of those leaders are saying that they're not fully prepared for those disruptions, and that lack of readiness is tied to that enterprise-wide lack of visibility, fragmented forecasting, the inability to rebalance that inventory across all of those care settings that we were talking about earlier, before those shortages escalate into something bigger.

We see this firsthand because it's not that hospitals are lacking technology, it's that integration across technology so that the platforms can move that data seamlessly across the pharmacy, supply chain, clinical, and financial systems. It’s not just the pharmacy operations that matter, and when those systems are connected, those organizations can really move from that reaction to being proactive, and protecting that point of care at the patient level, so that they always have what they need, and they're not scrambling to try to order things that perhaps are being tagged with an emergency cost or last minuteness, and not having that availability, and really trying to reduce across their hospitals and their clinics, that impact of the shortages.