Michael O’Neal has been on staff at Vanderbilt University Medical Center since his graduation from Auburn’s Harrison School of Pharmacy in 1991.  Through his career, he staffed in the various operational venues within the medical center gaining valuable experience that serves him today in his role as Director of Pharmacy Procurement and Inventory Management.

Since 2005, he has directed procurement, inventory, and logistics for the department which has experienced growth in its drug budget from $80MM to over $525MM in annual spend. In addition, he and his team manage procurement compliance with the 340B program, WAC spend mitigation, accounts payable, drug shortages, interfacing with Informatics, internal departmental billing, centralized retail purchasing, and compliance with the Drug Supply Chain and Security Act (DSCA).

In 2016, a long-term departmental plan came to fruition with the opening of their Melrose Support Services facility which resides 5 miles from the main academic campus.  Michael’s team runs one side of the Centralized Distribution Center (CDC) that serves the Hospital/Clinic enterprise through centralized clinic filling, repackaging, Omnicell cabinet refilling and procurement and crossdocking of direct and dropship packages for the various campus pharmacies.  The team views their Operations colleagues as their customers and optimizes the hub and spoke model to create efficiencies for the organization and economies of scale across the board.

Their future, short-term goals include centralized non-sterile compounding for both hazardous and non-hazardous medications as well as other routine work performed within the central pharmacies on campus like emergency cart tray replenishment.  The CDC has absorbed the aggressive growth of VUMC over the past 4 years with no need for additional FTEs within their team which was the goal upon opening.  Michael and his team see much more opportunity in the future to pull work off of their Operations colleagues when feasible to allow the individual hospitals to focus more on their clinical missions.

Posted February 2020

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