$1.8 Million and counting: how volatile agent education has decreased our spending $1000 per day.
STUDY OBJECTIVE
Volatile anesthetic agents comprise a substantial portion of every hospital's pharmacy budget. Challenged with an initiative to lower anesthetic drug expenditures, we developed an education-based intervention focused on reducing volatile anesthetic costs while preserving access to all available volatile anesthetics. When postintervention evaluation demonstrated a dramatic year-over-year reduction in volatile agent acquisition costs, we undertook a retrospective analysis of volatile anesthetic purchasing data using time series analysis to determine the impact of our educational initiative.


DESIGN/SETTING
We obtained detailed volatile anesthetic purchasing data from the Central Supply of Wake Forest Baptist Health from 2007 to 2014 and integrated these data with the time course of our educational intervention.


PATIENTS
Aggregate volatile anesthetic purchasing data were analyzed for 7 consecutive fiscal years.


INTERVENTION
The educational initiative emphasized tissue partition coefficients of volatile anesthetics in adipose tissue and muscle and their impact on case management.


MEASUREMENTS
We used an interrupted time series analysis of monthly cost per unit data using autoregressive integrated moving average modeling, with the monthly cost per unit being the amount spent per bottle of anesthetic agent per month.


MAIN RESULTS
The cost per unit decreased significantly after the intervention (t=-6.73, P<.001). The autoregressive integrated moving average model predicted that the average cost per unit decreased $48 after the intervention, with 95% confidence interval of $34 to $62. As evident from the data, the purchasing of desflurane and sevoflurane decreased, whereas that of isoflurane increased.


CONCLUSIONS
An educational initiative focused solely on the selection of volatile anesthetic agent per case significantly reduced volatile anesthetic expense at a tertiary medical center. This approach appears promising for application in other hospitals in the rapidly evolving, value-added health care environment. We were able to accomplish this with instruction on tissue partition coefficients and each agent's individual cost per MAC-hour delivered.
['Miller|Scott A|SA|', 'Aschenbrenner|Carol A|CA|', 'Traunero|Justin R|JR|', 'Bauman|Loren A|LA|', 'Lobell|Samuel S|SS|', 'Kelly|Jeffrey S|JS|', 'Reynolds|John E|JE|']
D000769:Anesthesia, Inhalation D000072080:Anesthesiologists D000776:Anesthesiology D018685:Anesthetics, Inhalation D000072077:Anesthetists D017046:Cost Savings D017721:Hospital Costs D006801:Humans D007396:Internship and Residency D010607:Pharmacy Service, Hospital D012189:Retrospective Studies D055549:Volatile Organic Compounds
Desflurane Sevoflurane Isoflurane Drug costs Economic models Inhaled anesthetics