A cost comparison of Canadian and U.S. hospital pharmacy departments

The average Canadian hospital in 1990, with an almost 11-day average length of stay compared to 7.3 days in U.S. hospitals, had an average expense per discharge of $2,720 less than similar U.S. facilities. With the health reform debates underway, this large discrepancy estimated at $84.2 billion per annum for the United States, stimulated interest in undertaking a comparative analysis of pharmacy department expenses in medium-size and teaching hospitals in these two nations. If U.S. acute care facilities could have curtailed their hospital pharmacy and drug discharge cost to correspond to Canadian averages, an estimated $4.6 billion might have been saved in the United States in 1993. Reductions in these expenses could be influenced by how closely our health reform plan eventually follows the Canadian global budgetary target model and whether the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is forced to reduce its wholesale drug prices.