Once-daily aminoglycoside dosing: Impact on requests and costs for therapeutic drug monitoring

Recently, much interest has focused on the use of once-daily aminoglycosides (ODA) in the medical literature. In late 1992, we implemented a hospital-wide ODA program for adult patients at our 850-bed community-teaching hospital. In the first phase of implementation, therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) was accomplished with the use of a random serum concentration and a nomogram that had been developed at our institution. In the second phase, serum drug concentrations were eliminated on patients with normal renal function. The fully implemented program resulted in a 40% decrease in the request for gentamicin and tobramycin serum concentrations as compared with historic ordering patterns for conventional aminoglycoside dosing regimens. In addition, the incidence of nephrotoxicity was also reduced from 3 to 5% with conventional aminoglycoside dosing, to 1.2 and 1.3% for phases 1 and 2, respectively. Furthermore, the elimination of TDM requests totaling 300 for gentamicin and 50 for tobramycin per month is expected to result in an annual institutional savings of >$100,000.