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Science Reports and VigiLanz Feature News
Effects of an Adverse-drug-event Alert System on Cost and Quality Outcomes in Community Hospitals Frank Piontek; Rajiv Kohli; Paul Conlon; Jeffrey J. Ellis; Jason Jablonski; Narendra Kini.American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy2010;67(8):613-620.2010 ©American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (complete article)
Although retrospective this study of a seven hospital system used external control hospitals to demonstrate that after the system was installed the hospitals had statistically and practically significant decreases in variable drug costs from baseline to post implementation. Without severity adjustment these costs decreased from $360 to $337 per patient and with a severity of illness adjustment the costs moved from $362 to $330. The external control hospitals that did not have the system installed and during the same time period as the study actually saw increases in these same costs; but when the system was later installed these control hospitals experienced similar cost reduction effects There were also positive significant changes in total hospital costs, mortality rates and lengths of stay for both the study group during the study and the controls after they had the system installed. Thus in addition to savings in other Quality areas this study showed a $27.00 to $32.00 reduction in hard drug costs per patient after pharmacists had a tool to automatically monitor many situations that caused adverse drug events.
Writing new rules has always been easy with the VigiLanz system. But users wanted to be able to Stage these rules, hiding the activations of the rule from other users until they were satisfied that the rule delivered exactly what they wanted. With the New Staging feature the rule activations occupies a private area for only the user who writes that staged rule. Adjustments can then be made to the rule parameters until the rule suits the user's needs and then and only then can be placed into production and the activations moved to the general work flow area.