WASHINGTON — At the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, pharmacists are using old-fashioned paper spreadsheets to track their stock of drugs in short supply – a task that takes several hours each day.

Most of the hospital’s medicines – with usage estimated at $100 million a year – are tracked by automated systems that allow for quick reorders when the supply runs low. But these automated systems, designed to help the hospital avoid purchases and storage costs of unused pills and vials, do not work if it is uncertain when the next batch of drugs will come in.

A few hundred medicines make the list of drugs in short supply: anesthetics, drugs for nausea and nutrition, infection treatments and diarrhea pills. A separate list has scarce cancer drugs for leukemia or breast cancer.

‘Now we have to go through the pharmacy and count those drugs on a daily basis … to make sure we don’t run out,’ said Ed Szandzik, director of pharmacy services at the hospital for over a decade.

The growing scarcity of sterile, injectable drugs is one of the biggest issues confronting hospitals across the country, and will be a key issue at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting […]