Treatment of Community Acquired Pneumonia

According to the American Academy of family Physicians, there are 5.6 million cases of Community-acquired pneumonia annually in the US. The cost of treatment and care for CAP is an estimated $8.4 billion. The type of management and treatment of CAP and outcomes can significantly influence the cost of care and outcomes for hospitals.

Streamlining the workflow

University of Kentucky Medical Center(featured in the video) clearly shows how hospitals can save significant amount of time, costs and improve patient care by analyzing workflows.

Streamlining the drug preparation and administration process for CAP

By studying the process(time taken to process one order of an IV antibiotic ad mixture) they have observed that it takes approximately 16:42 minutes to prepare and administer the (Nursing + Pharmacy time). So from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense reduce or completely eliminate steps involved in drug preparation and have fewer administrations.

Efficient method of drug administration

Choosing monotherapy instead of combination therapy reduces the number of steps.Using agents with longer half-lives allows for once-daily administration, which in turn leads to improved compliance and outcomes and decreased costs. In addition, transitioning patients to oral therapy as soon as they are clinically stable can significantly reduce the length of hospitalization-the major contributing factor to health care costs.

University of Kentucky Medical Center applied this and reduced the time to prepare and administer Pre-mix doses of Monotherapy to 3:26 minutes