New survey sheds light on hospital pharmacies’ biggest challenges

Hospital pharmacy leaders have many stressors: tariffs, supply shortages, and high specialty drug costs are just a few.

A report released Jan. 29 by supply chain solutions company Tecsys provides more insight into how hospital pharmacies are prioritizing these and other challenges. The company surveyed 201 hospital C-suite executives and professionals who directly oversee supply chain and pharmacy operations.

According to respondents, the most common operational challenge is managing drug shortages (44%). Drug shortages cost US hospitals roughly $900 million and 20 million hours of labor annually, per a June 2025 survey from healthcare services firm Vizient, though the number of new shortages in 2025 was the lowest it’s been since 2006, according to trade group the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

The next most-common operational concerns were regulatory compliance (33%) and the high costs of specialty drugs (33%).

Healthcare regulations were in constant flux last year, and there are still others left uncertain, like proposed changes to the 340B drug discount program. Meanwhile, a report from Reuters earlier this month found drugmakers had raised prices on at least 350 branded medicines for 2026.

Setting the stakes. There’s a lot of money at stake when dealing with these challenges. The American Hospital Association estimates hospitals spent $144 billion on drugs in 2024, about 9% of their total budgets.

Of those surveyed by Tecsys, 46% said pricing pressures and drug shortages had a “severe impact” on their organization’s financial performance, and 36% saying it had a moderate impact.

“The cost of pharmaceutical products has continued to outpace inflation significantly,” Tecsys President and CEO Peter Brereton told Healthcare Brew. “[Drug costs are] becoming a bigger piece of the healthcare pie.”

Solutions to shortages. Some leaders are turning to AI for help managing their pharmacy supply: according to the Tecsys survey, 15% report having fully deployed AI or machine learning to forecast demand, optimize inventory, or predict drug shortages, and 35% are testing it in a pilot or limited rollout.

Brereton said he believes drug supply chain management is “ripe” for AI.

“You’re looking at hundreds of locations with thousands of products, each with expiration dates, regulatory control issues, track-and-trace requirements,” he said. “It’s very hard for humans to track and manage things at that level of granularity.”

Another potential solution to the drug shortage issue? An April 2024 white paper from the Department of Health and Human Services suggests establishing two public-private collaborations—one with manufacturers and one with hospitals—to make the drug supply chain more resilient.

Keeping track. Tecsys is also promoting its own technology solution that tags and tracks a hospital’s drugs with a type of wireless identification tag known as radio frequency identification technology, which is also used in pet microchips and keeping track of library books.

With this tech, information is immediately available on medication quantity, expiration dates, and exact locations. The software saves time and money by ensuring drugs aren’t getting misplaced or expiring due to being overlooked, Jeff Wagner, VP of pharmacy at Texas Children’s Hospital, told us.

A case study completed in October 2025 found Texas Children’s saved $14 million a year on anticoagulant drugs, like those used to reduce the risk of stroke or heart attack, using Tecsys real-time tracking software.

“In many other health systems, pharmacies don’t have complete inventory visibility,” Wagner said.

The Tecsys survey found only about 20% of hospital, pharmacy, and supply chain leaders say their healthcare system’s pharmacy can claim “full, real-time visibility across care settings,” including information on medication quantity, expiration dates, and exact locations. Brereton said Tecsys asked about hospitals’ real-time visibility in this survey because the company couldn’t find that data anywhere else.

“How is it possible that they’re still running supply chains with tens of millions of dollars of product in the supply chain, with [limited] visibility on where the stuff is?” Brereton said. “It would be grounds for being fired in any other industry.”