InsightRX, a healthcare technology company which provides cloud-based precision dosing support to guide treatment decisions, announced that Boone County Hospital, a 25-bed critical access hospital in Iowa, implemented model-informed precision dosing via its point-of-care InsightRX Nova platform to reduce acute kidney infections resulting in zero nephrotoxicity events. The hospital has also improved the number of patients achieving the desired therapeutic range for their antibiotic regimen by 27% in one year.
In May 2019, Boone County Hospital implemented InsightRX Nova, a precision dosing platform that uses pharmacokinetic model-informed Bayesian forecasting, to standardize its therapeutic drug monitoring for four key antibiotics, including vancomycin. Although the platform is only being used for approximately 50 patients per year, Boone Hospital has realized an annual $16,000 cost avoidance from reduced blood draws in addition to $7,000 in pharmacist time through efficiency improvements.
“In addition to saving money and time, we’re also saving our patients from too many blood draws, which improves the patient experience,” said Kimberly Askren, clinical pharmacist and antimicrobial stewardship champion at Boone County Hospital. “Previously, patients needed to have two blood samples taken at precise times, and then we needed to run the manual calculation using a pharmacokinetic equation. Now, we measure the vancomycin level in the regular morning blood draw, and it takes me a tenth of the time to get the correct dose. That extra clinical time is really valuable.”
Also Read: Comtech Awarded a 5G Contract with a Tier-One Mobile Network Operator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
With five clinics, including a walk-in urgent care, Boone County Hospital serves a large rural population from across central Iowa, treating an average of 800 emergency patients every month. Nearby infectious disease physicians also refer patients to Boone Hospital’s outpatient infusion center, which conducts long-term antibiotic dosing for patients with serious infections. In the past few years, the center identified a need to prevent adverse effects, including tinnitus and acute kidney injury (AKI), for patients who were receiving a triple therapy of gentamicin, vancomycin, and a broad-spectrum antibiotic.
Vancomycin is an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections. Inadequate dosages can be ineffective and lead to possible resistance, while excessive dosages frequently cause AKIs. Affecting nearly 500,000 patients in the U.S. each year, AKIs add up to $81,000 in additional per-patient hospital costs, according to a recent literature review in the Journal of Pharmacy Practice.