Clinical Pharmacology & Biopharmaceutics
Open Access

Abstract

Hospital pharmacy departments have traditionally batched the production of Compounded Sterile Products (CSP). Since the batches are intended to satisfy several hours, or even a dayâ�?�?s worth of demand, the cancellation of orders by physicians can lead to considerable waste. The manager of the pharmacy department can choose to produce the CSP medication in one or more batches per day. In making this decision the manager is trading off two sorts of costs: (a) the â�?�?holding costâ�? of carrying inventory, which in this context is largely the cost of wasted doses, and (b) the â�?�?set up costâ�? of the labor for delivering the CSPs to hospital units. Although this trade-off resembles a classic batching problem, it turns out to be quite different. This is primarily because the sequence of batches must repeat in a 24-hour cycle and the holding cost, related to medication waste, varies over the 24-hour cycle according to the pattern of order cancellations, which in turn depends on the physiciansâ�?�? schedules. In addition, the setup cost, related to the cost of the delivery, varies slightly with the cost of labor at different times of the day. While previous work has looked at the benefits of multiple batches per day, the problem has not been addressed in a mathematically rigorous manner. We introduce a mathematical methodology to allow pharmacy managers to make prospective rational decisions about the optimal number and timing of CSP production batches based on the specific patterns of costs and work practices found in their hospitals.

Biography

Email: vera.tilson@Simon.Rochester.edu