Healthcare Business Intelligence Case Study: Antibiotic Costs Reduced and Care Improved With Analytics

When the weakening economy and state budget deficits took their toll on hospital revenue, California’s Eisenhower Medical Center (EMC) turned to McKesson’s healthcare business intelligence solution to examine the prescribing of high-cost, high-use broad spectrum antibiotics in postoperative care. They wanted to analyze whether the drugs were being selected appropriately, or if there were comparable, lower-cost alternatives that would work just as well without compromising patient care.

McKesson’s enterprise intelligence solution enabled EMC to drill down through the data to view the findings in terms of cost per occupied bed rather than looking at aggregate month-to-month information, which made it easy to account for month-to-month variations in the patient census. They were also able to include all antibiotics in their analysis, which ensured the results weren’t flawed because other expensive antibiotics were being substituted for Daptomycin and Linezolid.

According to Betty Nichols, EMC’s Director of Applications, Information Systems, their results have been “spectacular.” McKesson’s healthcare business intelligence solution gave EMC concrete proof the drugs Daptomycin and Linezolid were overprescribed, adversely affecting patient outcomes and costing the hospital a lot of money.

Because the evidence was irrefutable, physicians enthusiastically embraced a new prescribing protocol developed in response to the analysis, with some adopting the new standards even before they were published. Even surgeons who routinely prescribed the drugs as a preventive measure were convinced by the data to change their practices.

The analytics also enabled the hospital’s task force to look at discrepancies in antibiotic costs to see if cost increases were warranted under the new protocol (they were). So the benefit to the patients in prescribing the more expensive drugs was justified, while the risk of side effects and antibiotic resistance were reduced.

The net results:

Patient outcomes improved

Physicians were more engaged in the process

The hospital saved nearly $1 million in less than a year

The cost per occupied bed for both drugs examined decreased dramatically



Read more about Eisenhower Medical Center's use of healthcare business intelligence solutions by visiting McKesson online and reading Using Analytics to Tackle the Economic Elephant in the Room, by Betty Nichols, Director of Applications, Information Systems.