Costing pathology services: a practical approach to a difficult problem.

Abstract

Recent developments in funding healthcare have created a need to know the cost of each input into a patient episode of care. In most cases pathology departments will be faced with a complex costing problem in their efforts to meet this need, owing to the diversity of investigations performed and the variation in cost between the least and the most expensive investigations. Most methods for costing pathology services are resource intensive, from the point of view both of the initial set up and of maintenance of the data. They often require a level of financial detail that may not be available. The model described in this paper will accept crude financial data and can be refined as better data become available. In our hands the model has yielded useful information and has raised the awareness of staff to the cost of the work they perform. Although the model has been applied to an analysis of pathology costs, the principles are transferable to other areas which have a wide range of "products" for which individual costs may be difficult to identify.