When will needle devices become ‘budget-neutral’?
When will needle devices become budget-neutral’?
Costs may become comparable in five years
In light of the continuing risk to clinicians of bloodborne infection via needlesticks, medical device manufacturers should begin making needle-safety devices as affordable as conventional designs, an infection control professional urges.
"Manufacturers are making a bundle of money off of safety features," says Marguerite Jackson, RN, PhD, CIC, FAAN, administrative director of the medical center epidemiology unit at the University of California in San Diego. "That makes it impossible for hospitals under enormous cost constraints to provide the spectrum of safety products that are desirable. If the manufacturers really care about safety, make it budget neutral.’ That means a safety catheter will cost the same thing as a catheter without the safety features."
From a business perspective, it is not currently possible to make the devices as inexpensive as the conventional designs, but the cost differences are reasonable for some of the devices, argues Tom Sutton, MBA, vice president for marketing and sales at Bio-Plexus Inc., which manufactures needle-safety devices in Tolland, CT. The company’s phlebotomy device demonstrated efficacy in a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, resulting in a 76% reduction in injuries using a design that features a bluntable vacuum-tube blood-collection needle activated while in the patient’s vein.1 (See Hospital Infection Control, April 1997, pp. 56-59.) Still, to convert to such equipment, hospitals must increase expenditures from an average cost of 8 cents per unit price for a conventional blood-drawing needle to 30 cents per unit for a safety design. That results in an overall increase of $14,500 annually for an "average" hospital of about 350 beds, he notes. (See chart, above.)
"In reality, you’re getting the needle to draw blood [and the rest] is your risk management cost," he says.
In general, conventional needle devices are being mass-produced so efficiently that the per unit price is difficult to match with a new product, he says.
"You can get a [conventional] blood collection needle for less than 10 cents," he notes. "There are precious few things in the world that have manufactured, sharpened, sterilized, and shipped somewhere that you can still get for 10 cents."
The new sharps technology is still in transition. No single design has yet emerged as the clear consensus for the future, and safety products overall only claim market shares in the 10% to 30% range compared to the conventional needle devices. When safety needles reach a 50% market share, the industry could move to standardization and cost reduction, with prices becoming comparable in possibly two to five years, Sutton projects.
"Most people cannot start a car company because they cannot afford the investment to start having the volume it takes to make cars cheaply enough so that people could buy them," Sutton says. "It is very much the same case as needles go from the standard needles to safety designs. It is going to take a few years and a complete conversion of markets to get it where the prices get down to where they are low enough to be comparable. That only happens when you can standardize on a design and crank up a machine that can spit them out really fast. It is a huge investment to do that."
Reference
1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Evaluation of safety devices for preventing percutaneous injuries among health-care workers during phlebotomy procedures Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York City, and San Francisco, 1993-1995. MMWR 1997; 46:21-25.
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