Trends in Medication Management: Daily Efficiencies, Amplified Across Health Systems

Managing a hospital pharmacy is a numbers game: How much inventory is needed on hand? How much medication is being wasted? How efficient are day-to-day workflows? Every extra minute saved or wasted can multiply hundreds of times over in a single day, and over time, that adds up to a pharmacy that either runs smoothly or constantly feels behind.

Certain methods, such as hospital medication management and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking, should be paid attention to because they reflect the real pressures that pharmacy leaders face. To stay grounded in what matters most, regular check-ins with hospital pharmacists should be performed to understand their current challenges and goals.

Combatting Medication Waste and Optimizing Staff Efficiency

In the first quarter of 2024, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) was tracking a record 323 active drug shortages.¹ While the numbers have declined since this peak, shortages remain a challenging and ever-present reality for hospital pharmacists. However, over-ordering and carrying excess inventory are equally pressing issues, with rising health care costs across North America.

“One of our focuses this year has been transforming how medication is managed to enhance efficiency, clinical excellence, and patient safety at Southlake Health,” ​​Jennifer Daley-Morris, director of pharmacy at Southlake Health in Ontario, Canada, said. “Having the right medication inventory is critical and ensures that our clinical teams are able to deliver leading-edge care, close to home, to hundreds of patients every day.”

Southlake Health is a large community hospital in Newmarket, Ontario. As one of Canada’s top health care organizations, its team of over 1000 staff, physicians, learners, and volunteers operates several sites to deliver care to patients across northern York Region and southern Simcoe County. It also provides specialized cardiac and cancer care through its regional programs. Many of the specialties have unique challenges, involving specialty drugs or critical care medications that often go on back order.

Southlake has been a regional leader in using RFID technology as a tool for tracking and managing medications in real-time as they move through the hospital system.

“The RFID tags provide us with better analytics, so we can proactively redistribute drugs before they expire—reducing medication waste and freeing up staff time,” explained Daley-Morris. “Our talented technicians are able to focus more on patient safety and less on administrative tasks.”

Southlake Health was one of the first larger sites in its area to implement RFID-enabled anesthesia carts—a process that was driven by both the physicians and the pharmacy team. Daley-Morris says the carts are intuitive, easy to use, and offer clear workflow benefits, both for clinicians and for pharmacy inventory management.

“Having a bird’s-eye view is incredibly helpful as a leader,” she said. “It supports important conversations with my team and helps us find opportunities to reduce waste, improve efficiency, and most importantly, collaborate with colleagues to deliver leading-edge care.”

Ready-to-Go Trays in a Surgical Center

As a regional center, North Mississippi Medical Center serves 24 counties in north Mississippi and northwest Alabama and covers a wide range of needs and procedures. In the operating room (OR), this can place a major burden on medication management and organization.

For example, on certain days, the surgeons may perform 5 or 6 retinal procedures. For each of the surgeries, the OR teams require as many as 15 to 20 different medications. In the past, these medications would be manually selected and verified. If the case got canceled, the pharmacy team would have to restock the entire tray, starting from scratch for the next procedure.

“Now, we have an RFID kit for retina procedures that [is] ready to go,” Lori Eschete, PharmD, MBA, clinical pharmacy specialist in surgical services at North Mississippi Medical Center, said. “We have 15 of those loaded into the cabinet, so the technician does [not] have to pull those medicines every Tuesday. They [are] RFID, we know we have sufficient inventory, and they [are] ready to go. If they do [not] need it, it just stays there in the cabinet, and it [is] ready for the next case.”

The pharmacists have established ready-to-go trays for other complex or high-volume procedures, including craniotomies. Eschete explained that the approach has also expanded beyond the OR. “These trays have really helped us keep up on those high-volume days, and we're prepared ahead of time instead of being reactive and waiting for timely requests.”

Additionally, Eschete noted that her team confirmed the efficiency gains through a series of studies, including a lean process improvement tool known as a spaghetti model that tracks how many trips were made to each room pre- and postimplementation.² “There was a significant difference in how many times we had to backtrack and a significant decrease in the tasks that we were having to redo. It brings a lot of efficiency but also peace of mind that mistakes are not being made and drugs are not being wasted.”

Looking Ahead: Embracing Change and the Power of Analytics

For hospitals that have embraced RFID technology for medication management, there is a lot of excitement around the continued growth of analytics and what tools like predictive ordering could unlock.

“We have an opportunity to streamline the medications and supplies we purchase and stock,” Eschete said. “Right now, most providers don’t have easy, real-time visibility into what [is] available. We do have trays and RFID technology in place, but we’re not fully using the data. Better use of this information would prevent overstocking—for example, we wouldn’t keep 10 vials when only 1 is typically needed. Using data more effectively would also help us continue to reduce waste, avoiding expired inventory, and knowing exactly what is being used or wasted—not only in the OR, but across the whole health system.”

However, as always, any change needs to be very deliberate and careful in a hospital setting.

“Health care is understandably cautious—our processes are built around patient safety, and people worry that change might disrupt what already works. But as one of our anesthesiologists said, ‘If I can walk out of a store and be charged automatically, why can’t we have this in the operating rooms or procedure rooms?’ We need to be open to change if we want to be sustainable and continue to enhance care,” Daley-Morris said. “I’m very fortunate to have a team that embraces innovation and leadership that supports trying new approaches.”

REFERENCES

1. National drug shortages — January 2001–September 2025. American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. Accessed December 5, 2025. https://www.ashp.org/-/media/assets/drug-shortages/docs/Drug-Shortages-Report.pdf

2. What is a spaghetti diagram? American Society for Quality. Accessed December 5, 2025. https://asq.org/quality-resources/spaghetti-diagram