28 May Evaluation of alternative final cost allocation methods
IHPA required a ‘state of the art’ in-depth study for developing and understanding the various alternatives for allocating costs to patient and non-patient at hospitals in Australia to definitively answer the question ‘are all methods equivalent?’
Working with costing practitioners at study sites across three states and jurisdictional health authorities, HealthConsult reproduced the hospital’s original cost model from their source data and then systematically modified the original cost models by varying the allocation methods to produce a series of re-costed data sets. Statistical analyses of the re-costed data sets was performed, including to compare to the original hospital-produced costs to establish the significance of observed differences.
Costing staff at each site were involved in face validity testing and review of the statistical analysis to ensure that the results fairly reflected the situation at each site.
HealthConsult derived a ‘costing methods hierarchy’ of relative accuracy, which was a key input into the development of Australian Hospital Patient Costing Standards Version 4.0.