Minimising the costs of temperature monitoring in hospitals

Postgraduate Medical Journal contains an interesting and important publication on thermometry-related expenditure for hospital patients in two different parts of the world.1 As explained by the authors, the monitoring of body temperature is an essential feature of clinical practice in hospitals. Moreover, since frequent body temperature determination for inpatients is so widespread and routine worldwide, it is high time that the efficiency of the methods used be objectively scrutinised. In the parlance of health economics, so-called Cost-Minimization Analysis (CMA) appears to be a suitable, if not ideal, instrument to address this issue, especially in the context of this rapidly evolving digital age and the development of newer technologies. CMA relies on the premise that …