UPMC, Premier, Pensiamo join to offer AI-based supply tool

Three organizations have joined to develop a new pharmaceutical supply chain product that uses artificial intelligence to help healthcare organizations manage supply issues.

The product, called CognitiveRx, predicts, manages and solves for challenges such as drug shortages, inflation, lower reimbursements and other issues affecting the life sciences supply chain.

The partners include Premier, a healthcare improvement company; Pensiamo, a supply chain vendor; and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a provider and payer organization. UPMC, which owns Pensiamo, will be the first entity to go live on CognitiveRx.

The product gives access to market exclusive recommendations that predict drug disruption risks and supports identification of clinical, purchasing and inventory solutions, says Jim Szilagy, president and CEO at Pensiamo and chief supply chain officer at UPMC.

“The teams have developed a truly innovative tool, and we believe it will help UPMC and other healthcare organizations advance cost management and drug shortage mitigation strategies to further bend the cost curve,” Szilagy adds.

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Supported with artificial intelligence, CognitiveRx uses machine learning to bring speed and reliability to the process of controlling and reducing pharmaceutical costs by sending real-time “buy-right” signals to direct procurement activities and recommend formulary management strategies for buying the most advantageous product.

This process replaces manual data manipulation and integrates siloed data sources, so the solution enables rapid insights on price increase predictions, egregious price changes and margin capture opportunities, the partners contend.

“This collaboration is an excellent complement to Premier’s supply chain technologies to better inform overall contracting and sourcing processes,” says David Hargraves, senior vice president of supply chain at Premier. “As more health systems adopt it, we will continue to improve costs and ensure patients have the medication they need.”

Premier will offer CognitiveRx to hospitals and delivery systems and will include exclusive purchasing recommendations to maximize opportunities. CognitiveRx includes a team of advanced data managers, data scientists and pharmacy professionals who automate the intake and review of purchase data, then garner insights, add machine learning algorithms and create AI models to optimize pharmacy supply chain strategies.