Understanding How Health Systems Track Drug Shortages: Current Approaches and Future Needs

Background and Meeting Objective:

A critical component of public health and health care delivery is the ability to detect and monitor emerging or evolving drug shortages at the point-of-care. Drug shortages hinder patient access to critical medicines and may occur for many reasons, including manufacturing challenges, product discontinuations, natural disasters, and increases in demand, such as during the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE). This workshop will explore current approaches, as well as future needs for point-of-care surveillance of drug shortages specifically based on the work of hospital-based shortage activities. 

Currently, health systems report drug shortages and request assistance on how to obtain supply by contacting our Drug Shortages Staff at Drugshortages@fda.hhs.gov where FDA Drug Shortage Staff responds daily. This half-day virtual workshop, convened by Duke-Margolis and funded through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, will focus on taking perspectives and lessons learned from FDA’s COVID-19 Critical Drug Monitoring Survey Portal to further assist Center for Drug Evaluation and Research in implementing health care system interfaces that will maximize efficiency for monitoring and reporting shortages.

Funding Acknowledgement:

This project is supported by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award U01FD006807 totaling $3,193,089 with 100 percent funded by FDA/HHS. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by FDA/HHS, or the U.S. Government.