Supporting quality care with patient-level costing
Advanced certificate - optional module
20 credits, total study time: 200 hours (17 weeks)
In a rapidly changing NHS, this module gives an understanding of costing fundamentals and the importance of costing in healthcare. This is key to recognising how clinical decisions affect the consumption of resources used to treat patients. Costing has a major role to play in identifying variation in health services, in particular when linked to outcomes and quality improvement initiatives. In the current financial context, the NHS must do things differently – this means clinical and financial staff working increasingly closely, finding new ways of delivering care and delivering the best possible value for the taxpayer. This module will help learners to understand how costing works in the NHS and the challenge of capturing complex data to facilitate accurate costing. They will explore how NHS organisations and local health economies can use costing data as operational intelligence, and link it with outcomes, to support evidence-based decision making. It will also provide insight into what needs to change and the barriers to making that happen.
Topics covered
- Costing fundamentals and the importance of costing in healthcare
- Principals of data
- Activity data
- Working with others in the production and use of costing data
- Patient-level costing (PLICS)
- Using cost data as operational intelligence in healthcare - overview
- Linking costs and outcomes
- Using costing data as operational intelligence in healthcare – organisational/ service/ patient level
- Using costing data as operational intelligence in healthcare – wider health economy
- Harnessing the power of clinical and financial collaboration