Patient Level Costing
You know how much your case mix will earn but do you know how much it will cost?
Cost analysis and reporting is becoming increasingly crucial for Trusts. Foundation Trusts or those hoping to gain Foundation status have to be able to report on service-line profitability, and patient-level costing is just around the corner.
Ardentia’s new Patient Level Costing system fully meets Monitor’s requirements for service-level reporting precisely because it offers a quick way of costing individual patient records.
Our system works across Spells, A&E Attendances and Outpatient Attendances, and uses the same case mix classes as PbR (HRGs, admission types, attendance types, specialties, etc.). Within these classes it assigns each patient activity record:
- A direct cost (where appropriate).
- A standard cost (based on appropriate weightings for nursing time, medical staff time, theatre usage, etc.) which gives you a basis for comparing with tariffs to determine whether you are delivering care within income for each case mix type.
That in itself provides you with a powerful financial management tool.
The Ardentia model builds on this by also taking account of the fact that many hospital costs are fixed or semi-fixed. So the total standard cost of nursing for a certain case mix is not necessarily the same as the fixed cost of nursing actually incurred. The difference between the two is a vital measure of resource usage within the hospital.
What’s more, combining the standard cost and fixed cost view of the Trust, together with direct costs and overheads, enables the Ardentia model to build a full P&L reporting system for hospital managers. For the first time ever you can view the real impact of the case mix you are treating on the financial position of your Trust, and all from your desktop. Income, costs and the P&L position are just a click away. In the PbR world, can you really afford to manage without this kind of strategic financial information?
Healthcare Costing: The Ardentia Approach
The Ardentia approach is based on three principles:
- Standard costs are available at the same level as income data: spells for Inpatient activity, attendances for either A&E or Outpatients.
- For semi-fixed costs such as Nursing, Medical Staff and Theatres, adjustments are applied at Specialty level and the results compared with the total from the ledger. The difference between the two being a pow erful management indicator of the match between activity and resource capacity.
- “What if” functions that allow modeling of different activity scenarios are available.
Easy to Use, Accessible and Secure
All the information generated by the HealthWare Patient Level Costing solution is made available to you as Web-based reports. This provides you with a completely secure environment for your data, and means that it can be made available to any users who need access to it, subject to any security constraints that you may choose to apply.
For further information, please contact:
ARDENTIA
Tel: 0870 267 0008
Email: sales@ardentia.co.uk