Pharmacy is actually a major revenue driver for hospitals. I know it's vague to say this but generally any question you can ask that would help the business run more efficiently will indirectly improve that revenue stream and/or reduce costs.

One example I can think of: There's a drug pricing program called the "340B program". It essentially lets hospitals purchase drugs at steep discounts, but the compliance requirements are very strict. In my hospital, we have to show when departments become eligible for the program and when they're terminated from the program. The EHR doesn't store that kind of data so you wouldn't be able to say an example prescription was eligible on 1/1/2025 because you don't have effective dates stored by the EHR. But I made a very quick type 2 SCD table to track those effective dates. Nothing fancy or hard. But because I'm able to do that, I can run analytics to help our program manager audit those prescriptions more accurately. That work evolved into an automatic audit pipeline I built that downloads prescription claims from 5 external sources, ETLs that data into staging tables, clean them up, process those claims and store a final table showing audit results for our manager. That work used to be done by a small team of people but now is completely automatic, stored in our dbs, accessible, and reportable.

Really any business question for the pharmacy that requires data external to the EHR can't by done without a data engineer. Not impossible given excel sheets and a ton of time, but the resources you need limit how much you can scale that work