Improving medication safety and efficiency in hospital pharmacy through a pharmacist-led, low-code mobile...

Traditional manual inventory management in hospital pharmacies is error-prone and inefficient, jeopardizing patient safety. Low-code platforms enable clinicians to build software, but their impact needs rigorous evaluation. To evaluate a pharmacist-led, low-code mobile inventory application's impact on operational efficiency, accuracy, and labor in a hospital pharmacy.

A prospective observational study was conducted over 12 months in a 1,460-bed tertiary hospital (formulary: 3,850 items). Pharmacists used a low-code platform to design, build, and iteratively refine a mobile inventory application through agile sprints. The application was deployed across twelve pharmacy subzones. Primary outcomes were inventory cycle time, error rate, stock variance, and labor allocation. Analysis included paired comparisons, multiple linear regression, discrete-event simulation for scalability projection, and sensitivity analysis.

Average weekly inventory cycle time decreased by 60.3%, from 14.6 ± 2.3 to 5.8 ± 1.1 h (p < 0.001). The inventory error rate decreased by 75.9%, from 8.7% ± 1.2 to 2.1% ± 0.7% (p < 0.001). Stock variance per SKU fell from 14.2 ± 3.6 to 3.7 ± 1.2 units. Pharmacist-led iterations (1.6/month) correlated with error reduction (R² = 0.81, p < 0.001). Time on manual tasks decreased by 67.4%, reallocating 3.2 full-time equivalent (FTE) hours/week/pharmacist to clinical duties. Simulation projected error rates would stay below 3.0% with a 10% inventory increase.

The pharmacist-led, low-code model was associated with marked improvements in pharmacy inventory management, showing substantial gains in efficiency, accuracy, and clinical time reallocation. It offers a scalable, cost-effective framework for healthcare digitization centered on domain expertise.