Software's financial calculations give power to pharmacy staffing requests
Software's financial calculations give power to pharmacy staffing requests
Here's how the dollar amounts are calculated
One key to any electronic documentation tracking system is that it employs numbers that are meaningful to those using the program.
But in the world of hospital pharmacy there have been few recognized strategies for calculating the financial cost of medication errors.
"When we set up our company we realized there were no good standards for how pharmacists were justifying the value of their clinical services," says Charles Westergard, BsPharm, MBA, vice president of clinical affairs of Pharmacy OneSource Inc. of Bellevue, WA. Pharmacy OneSource was begun in 2000 with the medication management system called Quantifi.
"So I put together a spreadsheet that defines a model for how to assign cost avoidance numbers to a pharmacist intervention," Westergard says. "It's broken into three pages, and each has soft and hard cost savings where appropriate."
Pharmacy OneSource defined soft savings as those where if an avoidance of an error had been allowed to proceed then the hospital would have incurred additional costs, he explains.
"This is where a pharmacist steps in and says, 'I prevented this allergic reaction; the patient was allergic to this drug, and if I hadn't done this intervention, the hospital would have incurred additional costs,'" he adds.
The hard savings are where the hospital saves real dollars because of an intervention, such as a change in an antibiotic drug prescription, Westergard says.
Pharmacy OneSource obtained its basic cost estimates from medical literature of the financial costs of medication errors, published in the late 1990s, Westergard says.
"The numbers are pretty clear," he says. "The articles say when you boil down all the numbers here it turns out that every preventable adverse event (AE) has a cost."
The costs were in 1999 dollars, so the Quantifi program adjusts them for inflation, using a conservative inflation rate of 4.5%, Westergard adds.
"We went on to say that not every single preventable error will incur that cost," he says. "The primary literature says a certain percentage, about 3-7% of all AEs will go on to incur those costs."
Quantifi uses 2.6% to be very conservative, he adds.
What that means is that in every 38 patient interventions, one will incur the adverse drug event (ADE) cost. So if the cost is $8,500 per ADE, then it is divided by 38 to show what the cost avoidance number is for every intervention conducted, Westergard says.
"This applies to where an action of a pharmacist prevents an error, whether it's preventing an allergy or drug therapy consultation," he says. "All of these interventions are avoiding some mistake, and that's why we can use this cost model to apply to that."
There are a small number of interventions in which a dollar value cannot be assigned, Westergard notes.
"For example, when a pharmacist hands out poison control information, we don't put a cost number to that," he says.
One key to any electronic documentation tracking system is that it employs numbers that are meaningful to those using the program.Subscribe Now for Access
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