A new method of accurately identifying costs of individual patients in intensive care: the initial results

Abstract

The use of average costs or scoring systems to cost intensive care is limited, as these methods cannot determine actual resource usage in individual patients. The methodology described here allows all the resources used by an individual patient or group of patients to be identified and thus provides a valuable tool for economic evaluations of different treatment modalities.

Association of Injury Factors, Not Body Mass Index, With Hospital Resource Usage in Trauma Patients

“…Although only 3% to 5% of beds are located within the ICU, up to 30% of hospital budgets are spent on ICU resources. [47][48][49] The reduction in ICU length of stay is an important aim of the critical care unit because longer stays increase risk for infection and are associated with a higher risk for in-hospital death.…”

The development of a method for comparative costing of individual intensive care units

“…In the US, intensive care units (ICUs) consume approximately 20% of total hospital costs but comprise less than 10% of all hospital beds [11][12][13]. The UK spends an estimated £675 million per year on intensive care [14] which represents about 2% of the hospital budget. Despite this high resource consumption, very few publications report the costs of intensive care.…”

“…The opposite approach is 'bottom-up' costing [14,28] which ascribes a cost to individual patients based upon their use of individual resources (e.g. a syringe or a drug).…”

Cost and reimbursement analysis of selected hospital diagnoses via activity-based costing

“…Increased demands on the quality and extent of healthcare go hand-in-hand with reduced spending on healthcare systems, primarily caused by the fi nite resources of the public purse. Under such conditions, hospital organizations are pressurised to effectively manage their activities and outputs on restricted budgets [9]. A similar experience can be observed in developing economies with relatively low health insurance coverage [1].…”

“…Cost calculation is fundamental to the process of allocating the cost derived from accounting evidence to organizational cost objects, such as types of diagnoses or patients. By the mid-1990s, some scholars were pointing out the increasing need for a method that would obtain an accurate cost per patient, thereby permitting the identifi cation of actual utilization of resources by individual patients treated with different clinical specialities [9].They also noted that high quality data related to the cost of a patient could facilitate effective decision-making by hospital management. The importance of adopting an appropriate costing method within medical establishments has also been highlighted by other scientifi c studies [16].…”