P&T Committee antibiotic cost considerations.

With the changes in reimbursement systems, hospitals are finding it necessary to deal with capitation-based prospective payment systems of various types, such as the Medicare DRG system. Antibiotic therapy is an aspect of patient care that represents significant cost to the hospital and involves not only purchase costs, but administration costs as well. In-depth analysis may be applied in this area to determine methods of containing costs and optimizing reimbursement. Methods for accurately assessing the cost of antibiotic therapy are presented. The use of such analysis will be helpful to members of the P & T Committee as they work to determine cost-effective and efficacious antibiotic therapy in an era of prospective payment.