Pharmacy surveillance software for hospitals compared by KLAS score, EHR fit and pricing model
Sentri7 ended VigiLanz's eight year run at the top of the KLAS pharmacy surveillance segment in 2026. Here is what each product does, what the EHR modules cover, how vendors price, and what to ask before you sign.
8 min read
Pharmacy surveillance software watches lab results, orders and medication administration across the hospital and puts patients who need a pharmacist on a ranked worklist: a renal dose to adjust, an IV antibiotic ready to switch to oral, a bug-drug mismatch, an anticoagulant with a falling platelet count. In the US the separate platforms are Wolters Kluwer Sentri7, Inovalon VigiLanz and Premier TheraDoc, with BD HealthSight Clinical Advisor a distant fourth, and every major EHR now sells its own module.
In 2026 Sentri7 won Best in KLAS for pharmacy surveillance with an overall score of 92.6, ending VigiLanz's run of eight straight wins from 2018 to 2025. None of these vendors publishes a price. This comparison is written for a pharmacy director or stewardship lead at a US hospital who is shortlisting, replacing a platform or deciding whether the EHR module is enough. Antimicrobe is not a surveillance platform, and the page says where it fits.
What pharmacy surveillance software does
The core is a rule library run against live interfaces. Wolters Kluwer describes the Sentri7 Pharmacy rules as covering renal dosing, anticoagulation monitoring, IV to PO conversion and high-risk medication surveillance. Stewardship rules sit in the same engine: bug-drug mismatches, patients on antibiotics without a positive culture, duplicate anaerobic coverage, long courses. A pharmacist works the worklist, documents the intervention, and the intervention log becomes the evidence a stewardship committee and The Joint Commission ask for.
Most platforms also handle NHSN Antimicrobial Use and Resistance (AUR) reporting, which CMS has required through the Promoting Interoperability program since 2024. Some connect to Bayesian dosing software for vancomycin and other narrow-window drugs.
AUR is also sold on its own, and many EHRs are validated for it already. The CDC validated list, product by product, is in NHSN AUR reporting software compared.
Pharmacy surveillance software options compared
For the three-way stewardship comparison in more depth, read Sentri7 vs TheraDoc vs VigiLanz.
| Product | KLAS pharmacy surveillance | What stands out | Pricing model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sentri7 Pharmacy (Wolters Kluwer) | 92.6, 2026 Best in KLAS | Rule library, NHSN-validated AUR, PrecisePK and DoseMeRx integration | Not published, historically per admission |
| VigiLanz Pharmacy Surveillance (Inovalon) | 91.7, 2025 Best in KLAS (8 straight wins) | Starter, Standard and Pro tiers, Starter aimed at small and critical access hospitals | Not published |
| TheraDoc Pharmacy Assistant (Premier) | 86.6 in 2025, not ranked (limited data) | Real-time stewardship alerts inside Premier clinical surveillance | Not published |
| BD HealthSight Clinical Advisor | 65 in 2025, not ranked (limited data) | House-wide stewardship and adverse event alerts, metrics and reports | Not published |
| EHR modules (Epic, Oracle Health, MEDITECH) | Not in the segment | Same chart, no extra interface, build and tuning done by your own analysts | Part of the EHR license |
The platforms one by one
Sentri7 Pharmacy is the Wolters Kluwer product that began life at Pharmacy OneSource. Its rule library covers dosing, anticoagulation, IV to PO and high-risk drugs, its AUR module is NHSN validated, and its FAQ says it integrates with PrecisePK and DoseMeRx for vancomycin and more than 20 other drugs. In KLAS it closed the gap year by year: 88.4 in 2024, 91.4 in 2025 against VigiLanz at 91.7, then the 2026 win at 92.6.
VigiLanz Pharmacy Surveillance is now sold by Inovalon in four tiers. Starter is pitched at small and critical access hospitals and centers on AUR collection and submission. Standard adds the rule-based surveillance, Pro adds advanced features and analytics, and there is an Ambulatory Surveillance product. In 2025 KLAS, 100% of 23 VigiLanz customers said they would buy it again.
TheraDoc Pharmacy Assistant sits inside Premier's clinical surveillance suite, which also covers infection prevention. Premier's case studies cite an estimated $420,000 in annualized savings at Billings Clinic and a 33% rise in antibiotic-related pharmacist interventions at HSHS St. Elizabeth's, both vendor reported.
BD HealthSight Clinical Advisor still appears on BD's product pages. KLAS shows its score falling from 81.4 across 15 organizations in 2024 to 65 across 7 in 2025, and lists it as lacking enough live customers to be ranked. We found no statement that BD is leaving the market. Ask about the roadmap before you sign a multi-year term.
Hospitals moving off BD will find the replacements set out in MedMined and BD HealthSight alternatives, and the Sentri7 shortlist on Sentri7 alternatives.
Is the EHR pharmacy module enough?
For many hospitals, yes, if someone owns the build. Oracle Health licenses a Pharmacy Clinical Surveillance solution that it says identifies anti-infective administration risks and includes an antimicrobial stewardship worklist, with configurable rules, interventions and reporting. MEDITECH Expanse has an Antimicrobial Stewardship Toolkit with decision support and surveillance, plus MEDITECH Surveillance. Epic hospitals build stewardship rules and reports in Bugsy and the pharmacy tools; the University of Vermont Medical Center moved its stewardship work there from a third-party platform in 2019 and described four years of optimization afterward.
The trade is simple. The EHR module needs no extra interface and lives in the chart pharmacists already use, but every rule is built and tuned by your analysts. A separate platform arrives with a maintained rule library and a vendor team, and needs ADT, lab, pharmacy and administration interfaces plus a contract. A hospital without a pharmacy informatics analyst usually gets more from a platform.
What the Epic route looks like in practice is in Epic antimicrobial stewardship module.
Is pharmacy surveillance software worth the cost?
The published evidence points the same way, though most of it comes from single sites and some from authors tied to a vendor. At a 151-bed hospital, Huber and colleagues (Pharmacy, 2016) found documented antibiotic interventions rose from 144 to 270 after Sentri7 went live, from 1.6 to 2.6 per 1,000 patient days. HCA Healthcare reported on VigiLanz across 177 hospitals (Wiggins and colleagues, HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine, 2023): average alert response time fell from 13.9 to 2.6 hours, with an annual return on investment of 1 to 12.9. Two of that paper's four authors were affiliated with VigiLanz.
The honest reading is that a worklist makes pharmacists find more patients sooner. Whether that pays back depends on having pharmacist hours to work the list. A small hospital with a quarter of a pharmacist on stewardship should buy the smallest tier that covers AUR and the rules it will actually work.
How much does pharmacy surveillance software cost?
No US vendor in this category publishes a price, and we found no reliable per-bed figure in any neutral source. The pricing models are on record: Sentri7 has been described as priced on an admission basis, the old Pharmacy OneSource sold it as a monthly or annual subscription, and Oracle Health licenses its surveillance solution per admission. Expect a quote that scales with admissions or beds, plus interface and implementation fees in the first year.
Ask every vendor for the first-year total and the year-three total in writing, including interfaces, AUR, dosing integration and any per-module fees. If your analysts want to compare quotes against admissions and intervention counts pulled from the data warehouse, a tool that lets them ask plain-English questions of the data saves a round of report requests.
Where the antibiogram fits
Surveillance platforms act once a culture result posts. The empiric choice on day one comes from the antibiogram, and a weak one sends more patients onto the mismatch worklist. VigiLanz lists antibiogram data among its features and Sentri7 says it produces antibiograms, but many pharmacy teams still rebuild the annual report in Excel because the platform output does not follow CLSI M39 the way their committee wants, or because the lab owns the report.
That is the job Antimicrobe does. It builds the cumulative antibiogram from a lab CSV export with the M39 first isolate and 30 isolate rules applied, cut by unit and source, for $249 a month on the Lab plan or $749 a month on Stewardship for unit cuts, quarterly trends and MDRO counts. It does not send alerts, run a worklist or submit AUR, so it sits beside whichever platform you choose.
The options for the report itself are compared in best antibiogram software for hospitals, and the plan limits are on the pricing page.
Questions to ask on a pharmacy surveillance demo
- Show the five rules your current customers our size use most, firing on real results. Which ship on by default?
- How many alerts a day does a hospital of our size see, and what share lead to an intervention?
- Which interfaces do you need from us (ADT, lab, pharmacy orders, MAR), and who builds them?
- Is AUR submission included in this tier, and is it NHSN validated for both AU and AR?
- Which Bayesian dosing tools do you integrate with, and is that a separate contract?
- How do you price, per admission, per bed or per module, and what is the year-three total?
- Can we export intervention logs and antibiogram data to our own warehouse?
Related on this site: Sentri7 vs TheraDoc vs VigiLanz, Sentri7 alternatives, VigiLanz alternatives, bug-drug mismatch software, antimicrobial stewardship software for community hospitals.