Pill Dispenser can save 250 Billion
Pill dispenser effect on the Economics of Health Care
MED-Q Pill Dispenser
Hospitals have been looking for ways to improve quality and medication Compliance for decades . Pill organizers, pill dispenser, reminder phone calls and nurse visits are just a few of the methods that have been tried
Approximately 200,000 Americans die from preventable medical errors. In 2012, medical errors cost the Healthcare System over 250 Billion. The cost was mostly made up of ancillary services, prescription drug services, and inpatient and outpatient care.
Additional costs according to a study sponsored by the Society for Actuaries:
- $10 billion were attributed to increased mortality rates
- 12 billion for 10 million days of lost productivity from missed work.
- The economic impact is much higher, perhaps nearly $1 trillion annually when quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are applied to those that die.
Automatic Pill dispenser can save Billions
It is better, more efficient, to use a programmable pill dispenser to take medication. This would assure the right medication , at the right time, every time. Medication needs to be taken as prescribed to offer the best out comes. With Non-compliance rates at 70-80%, a good home pill dispenser will have an outstanding effect on all those involved.
Bria Washington, a Register Nurse in Houston Texas said, "We would get our patients health, send them home and they're back in a month from not taking their medication at home. I show them the MED-Q Pill Box on my phone before they leave. The ones who get it, don't come back."
Using a pill dispenser that also reminds the user when to take their medication means patients receive the maximum benefits of their medication or they are not being harmed from over-dosing. The cost benfit ratio makes this a "No Brain-er"
The economics of quality care have changed substantially.
In a recent interview on PBS’s Nightly Business Report,[1] Dr. Mark Chassin, The Joint Commission’s president and CEO, said that only about a quarter of the nation’s 6,000 hospitals are involved in some sort of quality improvement effort. Medical errors could be prevented by hospitals quality Improvements by educating about or providing, a programmable pill dispener to exiting patients. The day of the 7 day pill box is gone.
Incentive for hospitals
The Medicare program over all these years reimbursed hospitals regardless of outcome. In fact, there are actually billing codes for specific errors. A hospital was hypothetically encouraged by the payment system to harm a patient just enough that they need additional services, for which it received additional payments. There is no current incentive to save Medicare money. Of course, no hospital decided to hurt patients to make more money, but the system does not encourage and reward better and more efficient care.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has for the first time stopped reimbursing hospitals for two major problems that cost the taxpayers, billions of dollars―(1) preventable readmission and (2) health care facility–acquired conditions, such as infections.
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How Big a Problem Is Quality and Patient Safety?
In 1999, the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued its landmark report, To Err Is Human, which stated that up to 98,000 Americans died as a result of preventable medical errors in US hospitals (see Figure 1), and up to one million more patients experienced some type of preventable error.[2] An error is defined as an act that produces a preventable adverse outcome compared to the natural progression of disease that leads to injury or death.[3]
Figure 1. Leading Causes of Death in United Sta
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