Premier enhances drug budgeting tool to anticipate and plan pharmacy purchases
The Premier healthcare alliance has released an enhanced version of its drug budgeting tool to help member hospitals build more accurate pharmacy budgets based on their individual purchasing patterns, inflationary indices and expected generics competition in specific therapeutic categories.
“The budget tool was very helpful in our budgeting process because it gave us a better forecast of the increase in medication prices,” said Mark Hughes, director of pharmacy for The McDowell Hospital in Marion, N.C. “In the past, I would have used a national average that didn't accurately reflect the type of medications we purchase. I feel this was much more tailored to our purchasing habits.”
Version 3.0 of the tool features pricing information for 85 percent of all pharmacy purchases, both on-contract and non-contract items, based on February 2008 through January 2009 member purchases. Included are estimates of inflation indexes for each line item based on February 2008 to February 2009 inflation figures, corrected for recent changes in contract prices and anticipated first-time generic approvals.
With this information, pharmacy staff can input an institution’s most recent six months of purchasing data and compute a projected drug budget for the institution’s upcoming fiscal year.
“In these troubled economic times, it is critical that hospitals have a reliable system in place to predict spending,” said Mike Alkire, president of Premier Purchasing Partners, LP. “This budget tool is customized to build budgets based on the hospital’s unique buying patterns, in turn helping pharmacies more accurately predict the amount of cash they will need to have on hand for necessary purchases.”
“The budget tool from Premier automates the collection of historical pharmacy purchasing data to allow me the opportunity to analyze and forecast budget numbers," said Trinh Le, director of pharmacy at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C.. "The tool is helpful and useful, thereby making the budget cycle for any pharmacy director easier,”
