An opinion piece from the New York Times states:
We don’t know what it costs to deliver health care to individual patients, much less how those costs compare to the outcomes achieved.
Authors Robert Kaplan and Michael Porter are currently working with several health care organizations that are working to find out what care costs.
They use teams of clinicians and administrators to identify all the processes involved in care, from a patient’s first contact with a health care provider through his or her inpatient stay and outpatient follow-up care. The teams then identify the quantity and unit cost of each resource — clinical staff, equipment, supplies, devices and administrative support — used in each process and add these together to learn the total cost of a patient’s care.
The author’s premise – if we don’t know what things cost and why, we cannot possibly bring down the cost of care. Read the entire article here.
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