Costing standards revisions promised

The HFMA’s Healthcare Costing for Value Institute highlighted a number of concerns raised by costing practitioners in a letter to the national bodies in August and this has led to a promise of change. Chris Walters (pictured), the two bodies’ director of pricing and costing, told a specially arranged HFMA webinar in October that the feedback was being taken very seriously. He said a decision had been taken in 2019 to issue standards that were highly prescriptive to manage the risk of transition to the new system.

He said this had paid off, with a very low rate of requested resubmissions for data quality reasons. ‘This gives us some leeway to issue revised standards that are much more proportionate and that we can develop collaboratively,’ he said. ‘So we shouldn’t see a return to the kind of burden you were placed under this year in future years.’

Work had already begun to revise the standards, he said, and the HFMA was supporting this work by making recommendations for change. Standards for 2019/20 will be issued for feedback this month, reflecting some of the issues raised.

A revised online learning platform would be issued alongside the new standards, Mr Walters said. This would streamline existing resources, improve version control and enhance the peer-to-peer aspects of the platform with user groups and forums.

He accepted criticism that workbooks and data validation tools used in the collection process had not been sufficiently tested prior to issue.

‘Partner working between us and third parties has not been as good as it should have been,’ he said. New service level agreements between collection partners will guard against problems reoccurring in the future.

Mr Walters also addressed concerns that the patient-level costing programme could be exacerbating existing difficulties with recruitment and retention in costing teams. ‘That shortage of cost accountants does exist and I have faced the same constraints myself,’ he said. But he hoped the changes proposed would be seen as a sign of how committed the national bodies were to ensuring they did not compound the problem.