Analysis and evaluation of unit cost of the laboratory investigations

Abstract

Laboratory service is one important medical service of the hospital. Data about the cost of laboratory service is necessary for strategies planning of the hospital. It can be good basic information of budget planning, evaluation of commercial status and good index for the equality is service of the hospital. It is also useful to get the data about unit cost of each laboratory test for further revenue analysis, which can bring the proper laboratory cost setting. Furthermore, these data can be the database for the physicians in selection of the proper laboratory requests. Therefore, analysis and evaluation of unit cost of the laboratory investigation is necessary. However, from literature review there were only a few studies about this topic and such studies had their own limitation. Therefore, systemic evaluation of the unit cost evaluation for each laboratory setting is still necessary. The framework for laboratory unit cost analysis can be performed as the following steps; 1) cost center identification and grouping, 2) direct cost determination, 3) allocation criteria determination, 4) full cost determination by indirect allocation added with total direct cost and 5) unit cost calculation. In this article, the literature review of the concept of analysis and evaluation of the unit cost and basic knowledge about this topic was presented.

Key Words: cost, analysis, evaluation