HEИндивидуална стипендия2024–2026

CompoundingPharma · Dynamic production sequencing to minimize patient delays for compounded medications

„Хоризонт Европа“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2024-04-01 → 2026-03-31
Финансиране от ЕС: 181 153 €
Участници: 1
Схема: HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

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Накратко на български

Редът на приготвяне на персонализирани лекарства в специализираните аптеки се анализира, за да се оптимизира времето за почистване на оборудването между различните рецепти. Правилното планиране на тези процеси помага за намаляване на забавянето при получаването на медикаментите, което е важно за здравето на пациентите.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Dynamic production sequencing to minimize patient delays for compounded medications

When standard medications are not appropriate for a patient's needs — for example, due to allergies, sensitivities, or drug shortages — retail pharmacies must turn to compounding pharmacies. These specialised facilities produce customised medications to order by blending raw chemical compounds according to individual prescriptions. Driven by growing demand for personalised medicine and increasingly common drug shortages, the global compounding pharmacy market is projected to nearly double from $16.9 billion in 2024 to $31.8 billion over the next decade. A key operational challenge for compounding pharmacies is ensuring timely access to medications. Compounding involves complex processes requiring specialised equipment, trained pharmacists, and time-consuming cleaning procedures between batches to prevent cross-contamination and ensure exact dosages. The combination of cleaning procedures and equipment changes that depend on medication characteristics means that the sequencing of production affects the total production time. Given that regulations typically require a prescription before compounding can begin, medication sequencing must be done dynamically while requests must wait in a queue, where delays in medication availability are associated with poorer health outcomes, making production control a problem with direct consequences for patient welfare. The CompoundingPharma project aimed to improve timely access to compounded medications. In collaboration with Roseway Labs, the partnering compounding pharmacy, the main objective was to develop and evaluate a dynamic production control policy that sequences medication production to minimize delays for patients. By modifying an optimal control technique traditionally used in robotics as well as guidance systems and applying it to dynamic production control we develop a production control policy that can significantly reduce production delays. Specifically, when tested on historical data and compared to the status-quo policy of producing a batch of the medication that has been waiting the longest, a policy that works to minimize the maximum waiting time, we find that a modified version of our policy can reduce average production delays by 32.5% without sacrificing maximum waiting times. More efficient production management will not only help to improve timely access to compounded medications, but given the expected growth in demand means less compounding capacity will be needed to meet that demand. This may also help enable faster recovery from drug shortages when compounded versions are available.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

When standard medications are not appropriate for a patient’s needs, e.g., due to their allergies, retail pharmacies must rely on compounding pharmacies to blend raw ingredients and produce a personalized medication to order. Given the growth in demand for personalized medications and the legal mandate in some countries that compel pharmacies to provide such medications to patients, the efficient operation of compounding pharmacies is critical to timely access to medications. However, there are complex operational dynamics when sequencing production driven by differences in medications and the need to prevent cross-contamination that lead to production delays for patients. Inspired by discussions with the management team of a compounding pharmacy, this project aims to improve operational efficiency and reduce delays by developing a dynamic production control algorithm that sequences medication production. The challenge of identifying optimal policies for multi-product production systems in the presence of set-up times has lead researchers to focus on heuristics, however, existing policies do not account for the sequence-dependent set-up times or batch processing in this setting. We propose and evaluate a theory-driven heuristic based on a novel modification of an optimal control engineering technique, known as the State-Dependent Riccati Equation approach. The performance of this heuristic is to be evaluated both theoretically as well as numerically relative to alternative heuristic policies via simulation. This contributes to the operations management and management literature, through the development and analysis of an innovation in production governance, a critical component of the industrial value chain in this setting. Moreover, the proposed algorithm can be modified for use in other complex production settings where optimal policies are intractable, and decision-makers must rely on heuristics.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

IE UNIVERSIDAD · SegoviaКоординаторИспания