Our Pharmacy department has previously described the implementation of a clinical documentation system. This computerized system is utilized by pharmacists in both the inpatient and ambulatory care practices throughout our institution, and allows for the comprehensive documentation of clinical activities. A major goal of the system is to accurately capture cost avoidances as well as cost savings attributed to our staff through their day to day interactions with the patients whom they serve. The method utilized for calculating cost avoidances as previously been described, relies on hospital-specific DRG data as a proxy in order to better quantify the impact of our clinical interventions on the patients' length of stay. During the initial 5,000 interventions, a series of weekly meetings was initiated where clinical as well as administrative staff met to manually review interventions in order to quantify cost savings as well as cost avoidances. However, a significant rate limiting step for the process was the amount of time necessary to accurately evaluate the numerous interventions. Currently, more then 40,000 interventions have been entered into our electronic database. The growing numbers of interventions documented has necessitated the development of a series of drug specific defaults which allow for the automatic calculation of cost savings and cost avoidances based on our historical data. This method 1) offers a more streamlined approach to the calculation of these important outcome data; 2) decreases the time required by the financial assessment committee to evaluate the economic impact of clinical interventions; and 3) provides a more cost-effective method of obtaining this important data to provide to hospital administrators, clinical decision makers, and department staff.