Article: The costs of adverse drug events in community hospitals

The article below appeared in the March 2012 edition of Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety – yes, that’s a real journal. I couldn’t make this stuff up – Anyway, there’s nothing new here, we all know that ADEs are expensive. How expensive? Well, the bottom line is that “ADEs were associated with an increased adjusted cost of $3,420 and an adjusted increase in length of stay (LOS) of 3.15 days”. Depending on the number of ADEs your facility has you could easily use these numbers to justify the services of a pharmacist.

The only problem with the information is that it’s from a 20-month period between January 2005 and August 2006. I hate to break it to you Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Aafety, but that makes the information all but useless. Interesting, but useless.