Multi-Hospital Division Saves Over $5 Million In One Year With QuicksortRx

Prior to implementation of QuicksortRx, the drug purchasing team responsible for pharmacy spend across a nine-hospital, 2,900-bed division in the Southeast reported working tremendously hard to protect their health system’s bottom line. The organization described multi-hour meetings pouring over data with their central fill pharmacy, 340B, and informatics teams — only to find a handful of actions to take.

Because of the amount of work required to gather and analyze purchase and pricing information, decisions were frequently based off old data. The team’s approach to drug purchasing was transformed when they went live with QuicksortRx in the fall of 2021. 

Developed by pharmacists and technologists from the Medical University of South Carolina, QuicksortRx provides timely, transparent, and actionable guidance to help health systems make better pharmacy procurement decisions and decrease costs.

QuicksortRx empowered the division to instantly assess medication price, availability, and volume trends across multiple facilities and their many account classes:

• Group Purchasing Organization (GPO) contracted prices
• 340B program prices
• Wholesale Acquisition Cost (WAC)

This allowed their team to make faster, more informed decisions to guide strategic purchasing.

After implementing QuicksortRx, the organization described moving from manual reports, painstaking analysis, and long meetings to a real-time dashboard that presents opportunities ranked by savings potential. The platform provided immediate, actionable information on operationally equivalent product swap opportunities across the division’s entire formulary, and the team reported that making a switch to more competitively priced options now takes just moments to identify, review, and execute.

The division’s purchasing and management teams reported that in addition to typical product swap savings, QuicksortRx’s platform and team provided significant help with budget planning, drug shortage response, repackaging, and an initiative to reduce WAC Premium spending.

In the year following implementation of QuicksortRx, this nine-hospital division realized more than $5 million in savings through its documented product changes. In addition, the organization reduced its WAC Premium down by roughly $500,000 per month, resulting in a WAC Premium under 3% of total spend. The division’s central fill pharmacy achieved significant time and labor savings with a repackaging optimization project. 

The division’s drug purchasing teams continue to access QuicksortRx daily, and have praised the QuicksortRx team for their accessibility, ongoing support, and responsiveness to requests.