Economic impact of pharmaceutical interventions in a medium complexity Brazilian university hospital

Abstract

Clinical pharmacists have been increasing their participation mainly through actions aimed at patient care, with international studies demonstrating favorable cost-benefit ratio from pharmacists interventions. However, there are few studies carried out in Brazil about the subject. This study aims to assess the economic impact of pharmaceutical interventions (PIs) in a hospital setting performed in October 2018. Each performed PI was registered and associated with the direct cost of drugs for economic impact analysis. A total of 185 PIs were evaluated, comprising 106 patients. The most intervened drugs were antibiotics, presenting the greatest economic

Validation and testing of the O-PALM mono-dimensional tool for evaluating the economic impact of pharmacist interventions in a Teaching Hospital

“…Cost without PI refers to the cost of administering a therapy as indicated without the aid of a pharmacist. This application of the O-PALM tool is like other studies that looked at the cost of treatment with PI initiated at the commencement of therapy [29,38,39].…”

“…Furthermore, the economic impact can be further classi ed as positive (i.e., the total of PIs that raised expenses and lowered the economic impact) and negative (the sum of PIs that decreased costs, thus increasing the economic impact). This study separated the analysis by PI to examine the variations between the real, estimated, positive, and negative economic impacts of PIs as done by similar studies [28, 29,35,38,39] While some studies, like Dooley 2003 et al [34], estimated both cost savings and cost avoidance when using their tool, O-PALM's tool only used cost savings and cost avoidance that came from economic evaluations like those of Leandro et al [29],…”

“…Hospital [29], as well as the impact of PIs on drug treatment costs in an intensive care unit [36]. The O-PALM tool, a type of economic analysis, allows for the cost evaluation of an intervention by calculating the difference between the cost of the previous therapy and the one implemented by the PI.…”

“…The O-PALM tool is a mono dimensional tool was derived from studies that evaluated Pharmacoeconomic principles based on cost savings [27,28,29,30], cost avoidance [31,32,33] and both [34].The cost savings interpretations in relation to the O-PALM tool was cost saving was calculated as the difference in actual costs between the previous therapy and the new therapy that was recommended by the pharmacist. No other cost is added such as indirect cost, labor, telephone bills etc.…”