Cost-Effectiveness Study on Establishing a Warfarin Counseling Clinic for Egyptian Patients With Mitral Valve Prostheses

The outcome of poor adherence to medications can be life threatening with certain drugs like warfarin. For each 10% increase in non-adherence to warfarin, there was a 14% increase in the risk of under-anticoagulation with significantly higher rates of morbidity and mortality. Furthermore, warfarin therapy is fraught with several inherent problems. These include a wide variation in dose requirement, delayed onset of anticoagulant effect, prolonged continuation after cessation of therapy, serious interactions with a wide range of medications and food items, risk of major hemorrhage related to overdosing, unpredictable control in presence of co-morbidities such as hepatic and renal impairment.

There is ongoing evidence that better outcomes are achieved when anticoagulation is managed by a pharmacist with expertise in anticoagulation management rather than usual care by physicians. Pharmacists can contribute to positive outcomes of therapy by educating and counseling patients to prepare and motivate them to follow their therapeutic regimens and monitoring plans, which will result substantially in improving the quality of care, reducing complications, and lowering hospitalization rates. Thus, beneficial effects of the pharmacist-managed counseling clinic have been repeatedly reported in terms of cost-effectiveness, patients' adherence to and knowledge about pharmacotherapy, and the outcome of treatment.

The objective of this study is to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of establishing a Medication Counseling Clinic for outpatients with mitral valve prostheses taking warfarin therapy in an Egyptian Teaching Hospital setting. Availability of this information could be used to target further quality improvement efforts, which may significantly improve outcomes for patients and cost containment efforts in an era when cost-effectiveness is at the forefront of healthcare policy initiatives.