An analysis of medicine costs of adult patients on a critical care unit

Purpose: To evaluate the costs of medicines used to treat critically ill patients in an intensive care environment and to correlate this with severity of illness and mortality. Materials and Methods: The study was conducted at a London Teaching Hospital Critical Care Unit. Data were collected for patients who were either discharged or died during September 2011 and stayed longer than 48 hours. The drug cost was related to 150 drugs that were then related to patient's acuity and outcome. Results: The median daily drug cost of the 85 patients was 26 pound. The highest cost patients in the 85th percentile had significantly higher daily drug costs (median, 403) pound and higher scores for patient acuity. Patients with hematologic malignancy had a median daily drug cost (561) pound more than 20 times higher than those without. A regression analysis based on patient's diversity explained 93% of the variance in the daily drug cost. Conclusions: Although themedian daily drug cost for an adult critically ill patient was low, this cost significantly escalated with patient acuity and hematologic malignancy. A reference method has been designed for an indepth evaluation of daily drug cost that could be used to compare expenditure in other units. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.