Topic
Measuring Patient Cost – Boston Children’s Hospital
Instructions
Do not try to analyze everything – pick what you believe you understand best and focus your discussion contribution on that understanding. Hopefully, each of you will see something different and we can have a healthy discussion. The cases are only useful to the extent we work to extract the meaning. When you respond try not to always agree – just to constructively push back to develop our mutual understanding of the material. My hope is that we can get comfortable thinking about measures and metrics. Sometimes this can be distasteful in health care, but the reality is we always have to think about budgets and outcomes.
Answer Preview
The Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) Approach
The approach requires mapping out of clinical and administrative processes in the treatment of health conditions. The procedure is crucial in the limitation settings for efficient maximization of resources available for healthcare providers. The TDABC approach estimates patient care costs directly from administrative or clinical processes to provide valuable data for the improvement of operations (“Boston Children’s Hospital: Measuring Patient Cost (Abridged)”). As opposed to other traditional methods used by Boston Children’s Hospital, TDABC is accurate and more straightforward since it employs resource costs to healthcare seekers based on the amount of time used by healthcare professionals when encountering patients. TDABC application to Boston Children’s Hospital healthcare setting has facilitated the improvement of processes with new reimbursement methods even though it was rarely incorporated in the resource-limited settings. Currently, the hospital seeks for the optimization of TDABC. It uses it in a resource-limited context to provide more proficient service costs, correct treatment procedures, effective prediction of financial needs, maximized efficiency, and inform quality improvement. The difference between TDABC and other cost measuring approaches is that the different methods employ arbitrary allocations providing limited transparency in the actual clinical and administrative processes in treating medical conditions.
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