Background: Healthcare costs in the United States continue to increase, largely driven by the high cost of pharmaceuticals. Cost transparency, the act of showing the cost of drugs to providers, has been proposed as a method of reducing healthcare costs, but its effectiveness has not been studied on a large scale.
Methods: We tracked the volume of the top 50 medications in our healthcare system before and after the introduction of cost transparency in the electronic medical record on August 1, 2017, with a second group on June 27, 2018. We sought to determine if this intervention would generate at least a 10% decrease in the orders of expensive medications (greater than $200 per dose) and at least a 10% decrease in intravenous (IV) prescriptions when the oral substitute was available.
Results: We show a 5% decrease in the volume of expensive medications ordered in the 12 months following the intervention and a 25% decrease in IV medications during the same time frame, with the decrease in IV volumes roughly matched by increase in PO volumes. This led to ~$225K in cost savings.
Conclusions: We believe that cost transparency can be a low-intensity intervention to decrease unnecessary prescribing and increase the learning in our healthcare system.