TON Sells Case Study

TON Sells is an Indian Health Service hospital that mainly serves Native Americans in southern Arizona. The main mission of the hospital is to provide the highest standard of care to Native Americans. To accomplish this vision, the hospital has recruited some of the best talents across the United States in addition to employing advanced medical technology to improve the health status of its patients. However, the hospital’s quality of care has been recently compromised as a result of this year’s increase in 15% of the medication error rate. Unfortunately, this problem has significantly affected the hospital in many ways. Namely, 20 patients have experienced medication-related adverse effects, the hospital has lost $525,000 in revenue, and the productivity of medical staff has declined. Several factors may have contributed to the upsurge in the medication error rate. Nevertheless, the main cause is primarily due to outmoded medical technology. Other causes encompass the shortage of staff and the precipitous upswing in the number of patients that the hospital has served this year. The
When comparing the cost of preventing one harmful event caused by medication errors using BCMA with the cost of providing patient care for the same error without BCMA, studies have shown that BCMA can reduce hospitals’ expenditures. In particular, one study has shown that the price of preventing one harmful medication error is $2,000 with BCMA as compared to an approximate price range of $3,100 to $7,400 without BCMA (Sakowski & Ketchel, 2013). Furthermore, another key study has also disclosed that after implementing BCMA, the hospital broke even in year 4 with net benefits of $3.49 million in year 5 (Maviglia et al., 2007). Hence, these results have consistently shown that hospitals, where BCMA was implemented, posted a positive net return of investment after 5 years of