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The Therapeutic Drug Profile (TDP) is our benchmarking solution to analyse the hospital pharmaceutical prescription for key clinical processes. Discover how our complete yet streamlined process helps you to monitor the pharmaceutical prescription from your hospital, from the overall perspective down to the smallest possible detail.

A new area of benchmarking: indication management

TDP responds to the growing benchmarking needs from acute hospitals with an innovative focus aimed at one of the areas of knowledge, such as pharmacy, with the greatest potential impact on current and future hospital management due to the way in which it combines and monitors efficiency and quality aspects.

Obtain useful information for different types of professionals

The TDP will provide important information both for medical prescription writers and for the Pharmacy Service allowing you to determine the economic impact of both functions separately: occasionally, cost deviations are not the clinic's responsibility but relate to a purchasing policy which can be improved.

Find out about your deviations from the surrounding area and act accordingly

Sometimes, higher costs do not mean a worse practice. The benchmarking for your prescription and purchasing compared with those observed in other hospitals will help you to find out the quantity and origin of the deviations. Once known, the hospital itself can decide on the suitability of these differences.

Pharmaceutical prescription, within your grasp.

By means of TDP, you will obtain clear and ordered answers for your hospital's pharmaceutical prescription:

• In which processes does your hospital demonstrate higher costs than other hospitals around it? What types of drugs are responsible for this deviation?
• Is therapeutic coverage responsible for this? Or can we attribute the differences to different purchasing prices? Which laboratories charge us higher prices (and what quantity) compared to others in the area?
• Is the choice of drugs, the presentation or therapeutic intensity responsible for divergences in cost to treat the same patients?
• What treatment alternatives exist in the surrounding area?

Basic characteristics

What does TDP include?

In its basic version, TDP includes an exhaustive comparison of pharmaceutical prescriptions for 10 Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG) with hospitals in the country. The customer selects the 10 DRG which they are most interested in from a list of DRG with high pharmacy consumption and variability, which IASIST offers for your consultation. The critical parameters include:

• the average cost for each of the DRG selected and for the different categories of drugs in their ATC classification, in its five different aggregation levels, the percentage of patients who, in each DRG, receive each specific drug, also classified in their respective ATC category.
• the quantity of each drug, in defined daily doses (DDD), which the different patients receive
• the average prices which the hospital pays per pharmaceutical laboratory compared to the average cost which would be expected depending on the environment, adjusting it for the mix of drugs effectively purchased.

The TDP also includes a presentation session and discussion of results with a consultant who is specialised in clinical and pharmaceutical information.

Based on international standards

As a drug standardisation system we use the ATC classification (Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical) from the WHO, given its accepted international use and the possibilities for analysis it provides due to its hierarchic nature. IASIST maps each of the National Pharmacy Codes (NPC) informed by the hospital to its equivalent ATC code.

Streamlined presentation

The presentation format (html) permits easy exploration with its Internet browser making it easier to drill down from viewing the over-cost aggregated to the DRG level down to the drugs and doses used with fast location of the differences between the hospital and the environment and the reasons which explain these differences.

What information is required?

To be able to get a Therapeutic Drug Profile, you only need databases which are standard in most Spanish hospitals nowadays: the Minimum Basic Data Set (MBDS) and the Pharmacy Single-Dose database with a single identifier for the care episode.