Cost Awareness Amongst Irish Ophthalmologists

Background: Healthcare systems have increasingly limited and stretched budgets. Clinicians have a key role in budget allocation. Awareness of the costs of high-use clinical items is important.

Aims: Assess awareness of the cost of commonly utilised clinical items amongst Irish Ophthalmologists METHODS: Irish ophthalmologists were contacted and asked to fill out an anonymous survey. We assessed knowledge of hospital costs of surgical materials, medications and anti VEGF drugs as well as retail pharmacy costs of commonly prescribed medications. The cost of items to the hospital was recorded from pharmacy and ward order receipts from a single university hospital. The costs of items to the patient were calculated by taking an average of 3 prices charged by local retail pharmacies. For each estimate we calculated the absolute error from the true price. We calculated the mean absolute errors (MAE) and percentage errors (MAPE) across the different groups.

Results: We received responses from 47 participants (15 Senior House Officers, 11 Registrars, 21 Consultant/Community Ophthalmologists). Despite 70% of respondents agreeing that the cost of an item should have a major role in its use, the average estimate was 124% inaccurate. Less than 50% of responses were within 50% of the true cost of the item. Self-perceived knowledge was acknowledged to be limited or very limited in 73% of responses.

Conclusions: We demonstrate variable and limited levels of cost awareness. Seniority and better self-perceived knowledge were not found to be associated with better estimate accuracy.