What Are a Hospital’s Costs? Utah System Is Trying to Learn - The New York Times

Do you know about the accepted notion that emergency department visits are so expensive.



Recently the University of Utah Health  Center began to analyze real costs with a complex set of algorithms.The linchpin of this effort at the University of Utah Health Care is a computer program — still a work in progress — with 200 million rows of costs for items like drugs, medical devices, a doctor’s time in the operating room and each member of the staff’s time. The software also tracks such outcomes as days in the hospital and readmissions. A pulldown menu compares each doctor’s costs and outcomes with others’ in the department. The hospital has been able to calculate, for instance, the cost per minute in the emergency room (82 cents), in the surgical intensive care unit ($1.43), and in the operating room for an orthopedic surgery case ($12).



The big question is why does an emergency room visit cost hundreds or thousands of dollars An ER visit of one hour adds up to about $ 500.00/ hour.







What Are a Hospital’s Costs? Utah System Is Trying to Learn - The New York Times