A new hospital-pharmacy benchmarking tool that measures trends in hospital-pharmacy management

Q. What inspired you to create this benchmarking tool?
A. Having held a variety of leadership positions in health-system pharmacies, I noticed a lack of benchmarking tools that were friendly to pharmacy directors. Most of the available reports contained data for the entire hospital, making them expensive and cumbersome for a pharmacy director’s use. The Grabavoy Report specifically addresses the issues of most importance to the pharmacy director. Actually, I initially designed the report to measure the efficiencies of my own pharmacy department.

Q. How can hospital pharmacies use the report’s data?
A. Pharmacy departments can best use the report’s data as a means to compare their expenses and/or resource consumption to that of other pharmacy departments of equal size and of other comparable metrics. For instance, the report compares pharmacies in hospitals with the same amount of admits, patient days, and adjusted patient days, matching the pharmacy to other institutions with similar volumes and similar acuity. Other databases compare hospitals based on their size alone, and that method simply doesn’t work.

Q. What data points are subscribers asked to provide?
A. We use 25 data points to benchmark our subscribers against each other. Among them are: total pharmacy expenses, total drug expenses, total productive salary expenses, total productive man-hours, total productive pharmacist man-hours, and total productive technician man-hours. I believe the report can serve as a means of “financial selfdefense” for pharmacy managers, who are frequently asked by hospital administration to cut down on their staff and to work harder and more efficiently with fewer people. Using the Grabavoy Report, you can demonstrate the productivity and efficiency of your department. You also may be able to use the report’s findings to demonstrate a need for more staff, staff-hours, or financial support.

The Grabavoy Report is a valuable tool that every hospital-pharmacy director can employ to measure the comparative fiscal soundness of his or her operations. The report can also help pharmacy management gauge the efficiency of the department and validate the success of their endeavors as compared to other like pharmacy operations.

Q. How often will the Grabavoy Report be issued?
A. Pharmacists can subscribe for an annual or biannual report. I suggest receiving it every six months, but it’s a must to receive it once a year.

The Grabavoy Report is exclusively represented by EXP Pharmaceutical Services Corp.