Program helps health system see true costs of care

The University of Utah Health Care is crediting a program that provides the cost of doing business for helping it to reduce its expenses over the past few year. While other academic hospitals in the area have seen costs increase an average of 2.9%, the University of Utah has had its costs decline by .5% a year.

The computer program the university is using contains over 200 million line items for hospital costs, from medicine to medical devices to the cost per minute of the emergency room (82 cents) or the operating room for an orthopedic surgery ($12).

Before the program was launched, many physicians and administrators at the health system could not provide answers to how much goods and services cost the hospital (as opposed to how much they billed insurance or got reimbursed). With more people at the hospital aware of these costs, the health system has been able to reduce its expenses while providing more efficient and effective care.

Source: New York Times