5 Top Trends From the 8th Annual CPES Meeting
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QuicksortRx on
October 26, 2023
The QuicksortRx team recently returned from the Council of Pharmacy Executives and Suppliers' (CPES) 8th Annual Meeting. CPES always puts on a terrific program, and this year was no different. It was great to connect with colleagues and meet so many new people while we discussed ways we can all make "healthcare smarter and better connected."
If you were unable to attend, here are five of the trends that generated the biggest buzz in Nashville:
1. One of the more significant industry trends is the move away from focusing solely on reducing pharmacy costs and move toward more efforts around generating revenue and capturing reimbursement. There was a great quote from a presenter who, to paraphrase, said, "I took over a cost center that needed to be managed and turned it into a revenue center that needed to be optimized."While cost-cutting and optimizing purchasing will always be a critical need for pharmacies, pursuing opportunities to grow revenue and developing processes to ensure proper reimbursement is collected are taking on greater importance. There is going to be significant attention paid to NDCs going generic, including how that will impact J-codes and how the codes will be reimbursed.
2. Centralized distribution services remains the model pharmacies are largely moving toward. This has been the case for the past year or so and shows no signs of slowing down.
3. The labor shortage remains one of the biggest challenges facing the industry. We heard the phrase "doing more with less," or some variation of it, throughout the meeting.
4. Chief pharmacy officers are continuing to learn they should not solely rely on the internal analyses from their group purchasing organization and wholesaler to guide purchasing decisions. QuicksortRx Pharmacy Account Specialist Jason Mills spoke to this topic in a recent Chief Healthcare Executive column where he stated, "The intelligence provided to a lot of hospital systems is typically delayed in analysis and/or carries with it some bias. It is not uncommon for a third-party recommendation to appear to show cost savings in one area but end up much more costly for the organization as a whole." This should serve to motivate hospital pharmacies to identify resources that can provide unbiased data on spend.
5. Many multi-hospital systems are finding there's an opportunity for improvement around contract drop-off and load issues.
We'll be attending a few more great meetings through the end of the year, so if our paths didn't cross at CPES, hopefully they will soon. See where we'll be and schedule a time to meet up here!
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