By Stephanie Ziara, Regional Vice President, Trulla
Every hospital wants to make smarter, more cost-effective decisions regarding pharmacy – but it is incredibly hard to keep up. Every day, new NDCs appear, contracts shift, shortages emerge, and prices change. Teams are buried in data while still chasing manual fixes. Reports and dashboards reveal cost-saving opportunities yet translating those insights into consistent action across multiple sites, accounts, and systems is an uphill climb.
For most teams, it’s only realistic to act on the top 10 percent of identified opportunities. Think about the time and coordination it takes to implement a few high-value cost-savings initiatives. The rest? That long tail of 1,000 or more smaller-dollar opportunities remains untouched simply because there is no time or automation to manage it.
Some dedicated analytics platforms provide helpful insight into pharmacy spend. They play an important role in visibility. But visibility alone does not capture savings. Without automation to standardize buying behavior across all facilities, the best analytics platform still leaves money on the table.
When we step back and look at the data, the pattern is hard to ignore. The biggest opportunities are rarely the whole story, and the long tail of overlooked savings adds up quickly. Consider one recent client example, a health system with over 1,000 beds. The client’s initial review of 10 high-impact NDC standardizations generated nearly $900K in savings over 12 months. But the remaining opportunities that Trulla captured from over 1,200 medications, with an average of $1,700 in savings per medication, totaled more than $2 million!
This is exactly the kind of “long tail” that gets left behind without automation, and this is exactly where Trulla shines the brightest. Trulla connects analytics to action by automating pharmacy procurement. Our platform standardizes NDCs, applies supplier logic, and ensures that the right product is ordered from the right supplier, every time. With Trulla, orders are routed to wholesalers, direct manufacturers, and internal CSCs or centralized inventory locations. By using Trulla, clients are finally capturing the long tail of savings that analytics alone cannot reach, reducing generic spend by an average of 10 to 15 percent and simplifying pharmacy operations along the way.
Getting started is simple. Implementation requires minimal IT involvement, with only single sign-on and security review, if required by the health system. Ongoing support is built in. The Trulla team handles setup, data integration, and training, then continues to guide optimization as savings grow.
As hospitals and health systems face mounting financial pressures, workforce shortages, and the need for tighter control of pharmacy spend, every percentage point matters. Automating the process, supporting your 340B strategy, or optimizing a CSC is not just about efficiency, it is about protecting margins. With Trulla, you don’t have to choose between analytics and action. You can have it all: insight, automation, and sustained savings across your entire pharmacy supply chain.