Variability in costs across hospital wards. A study of Chinese hospitals.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Analysts estimating the costs or cost-effectiveness of health interventions requiring hospitalization often cut corners because they lack data and the costs of undertaking full step-down costing studies are high. They sometimes use the costs taken from a single hospital, sometimes use simple rules of thumb for allocating total hospital costs between general inpatient care and the outpatient department, and sometimes use the average cost of an inpatient bed-day instead of a ward-specific cost.

Purpose

In this paper we explore for the first time the extent and the causes of variation in ward-specific costs across hospitals, using data from China. We then use the resulting model to show how ward-specific costs for hospitals outside the data set could be estimated u

SUBMITTER: Adam T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4038551 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature