Licensing committee hears hospital case for expanded pharmacy technician roles and discusses letting PICs set inpatient ratios

The California State Board of Pharmacy Licensing Committee on June 12 heard presentations from four health systems on how pharmacy technicians are used in hospitals and discussed changing the board's inpatient pharmacist-to-pharmacy-technician ratio to give pharmacy directors more flexibility.

The committee convened in Sacramento for an agenda item on Title 16 of the California Code of Regulations (text listed in the meeting materials) concerning technicians in hospitals with clinical pharmacy programs and received presentations from Stanford HealthCare, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, UC San Diego Health and Kaiser Permanente.

Hospital presenters described broad technician roles beyond dispensing: sterile compounding, automation oversight, unit-dose and automated-dispensing-machine management, medication-history interviews, benefits checks and prior-authorizations, controlled-substance surveillance, and analytics. Dandry Desai, executive director of pharmacy at Stanford HealthCare, said Stanford verifies roughly "10,000 orders per day" across its system and dispenses about "22,000 doses per day" in the inpatient setting, adding that technicians now perform…