Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Running on Empty - August 2019 - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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demands a bit of clinical creativity, constant communication with your surgical team and plenty of hard work. 1. Monitor drug shortages daily. Start by being proactive, not reactive, when managing your facility's drug inventory. Review the live list of drug shortages that's posted on the website of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ashp.org/shortages). The list should be your go-to resource. Check it every day and sign up to receive email alerts of new and resolved shortages. Dextrose is on it right now. Bupivacaine, too. And fentanyl and ketorolac. Obtaining various sizes of morphine and hydromorphone has also been prob- lematic in recent months. 2. Stock up on drugs in shortage. If a drug you need is on shortage, scour the online inventories of your medication suppliers and immediately order available supplies, suggests Thomas Durick, MD, a consultant anesthesiologist with Envision Physician Services in Walnut Creek, Calif. Dr. Durick, the former medical director of a busy multispecialty sur- gery center in the San Francisco Bay Area, recalls dropping a batch of medications into his online shopping cart and clicking to confirm the order — only to find the inventory he reserved seconds earlier had vanished. "The market is that volatile," he says. "If you put off ordering med- ications that are in short supply, even for a couple hours, you might come up empty." Comparing current shortages to your facility's inventory should sit atop your to-do list. As a consultant, Dr. Durick regularly visits 6 sur- gery centers and is surprised that even the largest and busiest one has only a single staff member who monitors drug shortages — on a part- 3 4 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • A U G U S T 2 0 1 9

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