Harrison Memorial Hospital
Harrison Memorial Hospital (HMH) is one of the few independently owned regional hospitals in Kentucky. It is a disproportionate share hospital(DSH), meaning it serves a high volume of low-income, uninsured and Medicaid patients. With over 650 employees, HMH is also the largest employer in the region.
For the communities it serves, HMH's pharmacy offers the rare personalfeel of a community pharmacy backed by the resources and specializations of a full health system. Its second location is dedicated to retail pharmacy services.
THE CHALLENGE
At HMH's ambulatory pharmacy, every purchasing decision carries risk. The team operates under a strict primary vendor contract, and with drug costs rising industry-wide, the margin for inefficiency has never been smaller.
HMH was operating blindly. As part of its wholesaler agreement, the team could only purchase a limited percentage of its volume from secondary vendors. Without a tool to track that spend in real time, there was no reliable way to know how close they were to breaching compliance. The result: they largely avoided secondary vendors altogether, leaving meaningful savings on the table.
The manual workaround fell primarily to Courtney Bennett, Clinic Pharmacy Business Operations Specialist:
“We had three secondary wholesalers at the time. I had to email each of our reps from those places, get their costs, compare them and put everything in a spreadsheet. There were minimums for each. I'm pretty sure each one had around a $150 minimum, so I had to decide if the cost savings were even high enough to justify using them. I became very fluent in spreadsheets.”
Drew Stanley, Director of Ambulatory Pharmacy, describes the compliance dimension that made the situation even harder to manage:
“I can only buy a certain percentage outside of our main contract with our primary vendor. So, if I order from a secondary, how close am I to being out of compliance? Did I even have any room to buy from secondaries? It was all a gray area. We didn't know because we had to manually track every dollar spent and compare it to everything spent on our primary. So we would only order products if we couldn't get them from the primary wholesaler or if there was some substantial cost difference.”
Choosing where we were going to order each item from took 1.5 to 2 hours each day. Communication with our sales reps went on periodically throughout the day, all week. There was a lot of time consumed with that.
Adding to the challenge: the hospital's inpatient pharmacy was purchasing under the same master agreement, and Stanley had no visibility into their spend. The operational burden fell to Bennett, who managed secondary vendor relationships day to day, including emailing reps, comparing costs, and deciding where to place each order.
Stanley recalled, "We knew we needed a better way to manage it. But at the time, I didn't know software was out there that could track all your dispensing data and contracts on a dashboard."
THE SOLUTION
When Drew Stanley came across SureCost, what stood out immediately was that it was built by pharmacists, for pharmacists: people who understood the pressure of hunting for cheaper drugs as insurance reimbursements kept declin- ing. He made the business case directly to hospital leader- ship, modeling projected savings against their current spend and purchasing flexibility under their WAC contract. The numbers were clear. Leadership approved.
My pharmacists spend no more than five to ten minutes generating their orders toward the end of the day. You don't put a pharmacist in a situation where they're trying to manage pricing and buying when all they should be doing is taking care of patients from a medication standpoint.
SureCost is a unified pharmacy purchasing and inventory platform purpose-built for pharmacy professionals. It centralizes ordering, simplifies product sourcing and provides real-time visibility across all vendors, integrating with major wholesalers and pharmacy systems so teams can manage purchasing, compliance and receiving from one place. Implementation was straightforward. SureCost handled all backend file integrations without requiring significant legwork from the HMH team.
Drew notes, “SureCost handled all the files and integrated all vendors and software on the backend. There really wasn't a lot of legwork on our end. When we started the training process, we thought it would be a lot to get used to, but the software was easy to use. Once you use it a couple of times, it's simple. We've been saving money since.”
THE RESULTS
The results at HMH have been tangible and fast. At their most recent quarterly review, the pharmacy reported savings on a substantial monthly drug purchasing volume. Hospital leadership took notice.
You can never underestimate the value of time. It's something we can't purchase, can't change, can't manipulate. When you can give time back to yourself, which is kind of a cheat code in life, you open up the doors for other services and other possibilities. Tying Courtney up for two hours a day isn't a good use of her time. And it's definitely not a good use of mine, either.
For Stanley, the compliance dashboard changed everything: “Compliance is my biggest concern, so I log into SureCost every day to see where we stand. That's one of my favorite features, because I know the savings will take care of itself. You're always going to be finding lower prices with a program like this. But you want to make sure you're doing it without putting your primary vendor contract in jeopardy.”
The shift in daily workflow has been just as significant. Pharmacists now spend no more than ten minutes generating their end-of-day orders — a task that previously consumed the better part of an afternoon. With the ordering burden lifted, Courtney's role has expanded:
“It's freed up at least two hours a day that I can spend helping out the team, talking with everyone, making sure things are going well, which is sort of my job, just in a nutshell. But also, the pharmacists are now seeing everything themselves at the end of the day. They're seeing what we may need the next day, getting to make decisions on cost, which has become important to all of them.”
As a nonprofit hospital, HMH has reinvested those savings directly into the community: funding patient transportation, expanded EMS services and new patient care initiatives across the region. And beyond the platform itself, Stanley points to the partnership as a differentiator: “The relationship with SureCost is very genuine. You don't get a corporate feel to it. They've come on site, spent time with us. SureCost has some big partners, and even though we're a smaller outfit, we still get the attention we need.”
