Abstract
Medications account for about 20％ of all medical costs, so it is important to reduce the cost of drugs. Most anticancer agents are very expensive, and it is reported to be more cost-effective to use these agents in a cost-minimizing combination when several different doses are available at a hospital. Injectable drugs are mainly entered directly into the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), but anticancer injections are entered into the regimen-ordering system for safety. When prescribing anticancer injections, selecting the lowest-cost combination is complicated for both doctors and pharmacists. Some computer programs that can suggest suitable combinations have already been reported, but are not yet available for either the EMR or the regimen-ordering system. Therefore, we attempted to develop a program that would automatically select the lowest-cost combination with the regimen-ordering system, and we evaluated the utility of this program.
When we investigated the prescriptions (57.2％ of all anticancer injection prescriptions) entered without this program from July to September 2010, 5.9％ of anticancer injection combinations were unsuitable and the pharmaceutical price difference was 329,795 yen. We also confirmed the speed of selecting the lowest-cost combination for some model prescriptions and found that it was fast enough for practical use.
In conclusion, we developed a cost-minimizing program that reduced medication costs and ensured safe prescribing. This program works with the regimen-ordering system.
