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CAPC Palliative Care Discussion Forum
Billing and Finance

Next Reply: Re:cost savings within an acute care hospital
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Post cost savings within an acute care hospital
Author: jhpsp
Date: Apr 15, 2011 2:33 pm
I have been asked to demonstrate how our PC program has reduced costs compared to patients who did not receive PC services within our institution. I know there are many variables in making these comparisons, i.e. varying disease courses within a DRG. Does anyone have a tool or proven metric I can use to assess this? Are DRG comparisons helpful and how would it best be done?
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Re:cost savings within an acute care hospital (by Weissman on 04/18/2011)
Greetings--I would suggest you start by reviewing a document from the CAPC Tools section: "Estimating Consult Volume and Cost Avoidance".

http://www.capc.org/tools-for-palliative-care-programs/finance/

If you still have questions after reviewing this, please contact me.
Re:cost savings within an acute care hospital (by lhspragens on 04/19/2011)
You probably should NOT try and do a comparison of your small PC population with a matched group, or try to replicate the statistical rigor of the cost study (Archives of Internal Medicine, 2008). That is why Sean Morrison did the multi-site study - it took a lot of patients and a big comparison group to get to a scale where reliable matching could occur. Don't try and do it unless you have a lot of patients (>1000 at least) and a lot of analytical resource with the skill base. It just will not get a useful result.

Concurrent Session B, Using Cost Avoidance Data, from the October 2010 CAPC Seminar has some info on this topic; check the CAPC store for the CD on this. This should orient you to some of the issues. Focus on slide 15 re "before and after" and slide 20 which discusses some of the data decisions you will need to make.



We do recommend running the "before and after" comparison to use your own data, and running the comparison ONLY for patients that died in the hospital. This will allow you to generate local info to compare to a couple of the figures in the cost article.

Good luck; this is not for the faint of heart. Critical step is to engage a finance partner in planning this out, and use the cost study as a strong anchor.

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