Background Because of current budgetary constraints, we are looking for savings in all hospital pharmaceutical areas, in particular in the supply chain.

Purpose To optimise and modernise the drug order process for our hospital pharmacy by building on the actual cost of an order.

Material and methods We chose to set up a step by step approach to calculate accurately the cost of one drug order in our pharmacy. This approach was based on two stages:

1. process definition of drug order, which is specific to our hospital pharmacy;

2. identification of the stakeholders for each step in the order process.

Staff costs are based on daily average times spent on each step and weighted according to the hourly rate of the grade concerned (hospital pharmaceutical assistant, occupational skilled worker, administrative officer or hospital pharmacist).

The full cost of the order process is obtained by adding the staff costs, and operational and logistic costs. These take into account equipment and room maintenance, and material and software expenses, particularly Pharma, Hospitalis and Chimio.

Results The estimated total cost for a drug order is 96€. The following elements emerge:

• receiving of orders accounts for 35% of this cost;

• we have on average 59 drug order lines per day;

• the average cost for a drug order line is 32€;

• everyday staff costs for the order process reach 1115€;

• everyday operational and logistics costs are 763€.

To sum up, 59% of the order process expenditures are related to staff costs, which are approximately two-thirds of the expenses.

Conclusion This study enlightened the fact that the number of orders within our pharmacy keeps growing, which considerably increases costs as well. It to optimise the order placement process will involve application of the following: o rigour in the stockpile management; o decrease in the number of contentious orders; o complete paperless orders, invoices and money orders via computerised data exchanges; o decrease in the frequency of orders, on the one hand by grouping them in order to avoid orders less than 800€, and on the other hand by complying with a particular frequency for the order recommendation.

References and/or Acknowledgements Great thanks to the entire team of Mercy pharmacy.

No conflict of interest.