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AUSTIN, Texas -- Gift cards to the local coffee shop helped a Johns Hopkins hospital cut inventory waste, researchers said.

A system that rewarded residents and fellows for choosing soon-to-expire equipment resulted in a 31.3% decrease in wasted supplies (down from $29,511 to $20,323 per month, on average), reported Andrew Demmert, MD, of Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, at the annual meeting of the Society of Interventional Radiology.

Putting equipment expiring in the next 30 days on a cart in a central location and giving a $5 gift card to the hospital cafe to each person who used an item off it saved $135,860 over the 13-month trial period and cost just $2,355 in gift cards.

Before this "fairly simple" system, the inpatient interventional radiology department had to toss out $25,000 to $30,000 worth of expired supplies every month, Demmert said.

He and his colleagues are now rolling out their waste-reducing intervention to sister hospitals.

Knowing how many supplies were actually expiring before they got used also allowed the staff to stop ordering as much or to request that vendors replace their expiring supplies at a lower cost, according to the presenter.

Such feedback was a distinct aspect of the intervention, emphasized Amol Navathe, MD, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, who was not involved with the study. "It may be unclear how much the $5 versus this information itself affected the outcomes."

"It's always difficult to know if it is the gift, which in this case is relatively small, or the attention provided through the communication that really made the difference," commented Eugene Schneller, PhD, of Arizona State University in Tempe.

After the study's presentation, a member of the audience suggested that similar efforts be expanded to operating rooms and cath labs, to which Demmert agreed but said current discussions are to bring the intervention to other interventional radiology departments only.

"While in general it seems this could be implemented in other places, the study design may not be rigorous enough to make conclusive inferences about its effectiveness," Navathe told 番茄社区app. He noted the lack of a control group.

As for whether these types of interventions can be applied more widely in the real world, it may depend on each physician's specific work situation.

"I'd be especially interested in the extent to which the clinician is employed by the hospital rather than an attending physician. Physician compliance does seem from my own research to be associated with employment, but other physician hospital contracts can have a similar outcome," according to Schneller.

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