RAPID: Rapid Monitoring and Assessment of Critical Pharmaceutical Supply Chains

Engineering - Over the past decade, the U.S. has persistently experienced significant therapeutic drug shortages, jeopardizing patient care and diminishing economic prosperity due to increased healthcare costs. The current COVID-19 epidemic threatens to overwhelm hospital supplies of medicines and therapeutics in large urban centers as part of the first wave of infections across the country. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that effective medicines to treat COVID-19 disease are currently under development or in testing phases, resulting in very limited supplies. This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant will collect useful, time-sensitive data related to operations of hospital pharmacies as they dispense these critical therapeutics during the pandemic. The analysis of these data will provide insight into the pharmaceutical supply networks with the goal of breaking the cycle of repeated and recurrent shortages, as pointed out in the FDA's Drug Shortage Task Force's report in 2019.

The PIs will collect quantitative and qualitative information on the inventories and distribution of available and emerging therapeutics to document the allocation of scarce medicines to hospital patients in a large urban hospital system. Quantitative data on demand and supply (physicians' orders, current and forecast inventory levels, available suppliers, prices, etc.) will be collected through a collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital and OrbitalRx, an online pharmaceutical exchange platform. In addition, qualitative information will be collected from pharmacists' notes and interviews with pharmacy personnel that documents the decision-making processes and workflows associated with allocating scarce therapeutics resources to critically ill patients suffering from COVID-19. The research is expected to help identify gaps in information flows and decision-support models that are most critical for the management of drug shortages under extreme circumstances.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.