12 Jun Activity Based Costing for Community Pharmacy Programs
The Department of Health introduced a series of new and refined programs under the Sixth Community Pharmacy Agreement (6CPA) in 2017. As part of assessing the cost effectiveness of these programs, the Department engaged HealthConsult to measure the costs of delivering the Dose Administration Aids (DAA), Stage Supply (SS), MedsCheck, Diabetes MedsCheck and Home Medicine Review (HMR) services.
We used activity-based costing (ABC) to produce evidence-based estimates of the costs of delivering an intervention for the five in-scope 6CPA programs. A bottom-up costing approach was used and activity definitions were developed and refined through pilot site interviews and a substantial pharmacist target group. Data about staff mix, activity time, local hourly rates and consumable costs were obtained via face-to-face interviews at 40 pharmacies and 10 independent pharmacists around Australia.
The ABC findings were synthesised with the analysis of HealthConsult’s program monitoring and program evaluation data (separate project activities) to suggest recommendations for the Department to consider in revising program parameters going forward into 7CPA, updating the minimum datasets for 7CPA and updating monitoring and reporting frameworks for use under 7CPA.