OBJECTIVES To conduct an exploration of the hospital costs of extracorporeal life support therapy. Extracorporeal life support seems an efficient therapy for acute, potentially reversible cardiac or respiratory failure, when conventional therapy has been inadequate, or as bridge to transplant, but unfortunately, no evidence in randomized controlled trials is delivered yet. DESIGN Single-cente...

Hospital acquired infections (HAI) are a largely avoidable and costly burden on public health systems. Accurate estimates of the costs of HAI are necessary to gauge the cost efficiency of alternative infection control measures, but are traditionally very difficult to compute. In particular, existing studies of the costs of HAI do not take into account the possible endogeneity bias between the r...

The first study in a series concerned with the costs of different strategies of maternity care showed the differences between the costs of booked confinement at home, in a GP hospital for 48 hours, and in a consultant obstetric unit for 48 hours to be small. The study costed 1977 home confinements in Dudley and compared them with matched samples of hospital births. The factors that compensated,...

OBJECTIVE In a hospital based setting, identify factors which influence the cost of colorectal cancer care? DESIGN Retrospective case note review SETTING Nottingham, United Kingdom PARTICIPANTS 227 patients treated for colorectal cancer METHODS Retrospective review of the hospital records provided the primary data for the costing study and included all CRC related resource consumption o...

BACKGROUND To test the hypothesis that complications increase the use of resources in managing patients in hospitals, we examined the costs of managing patients with the same disease with and without complications. METHODS We used a database developed by the University HealthSystems Consortium that contains the costs of managing more than 1 million patients in 60 University hospitals. We crea...

Information on the unit cost of inpatient and outpatient care is an essential element for costing, budgeting and economic-evaluation exercises. Many countries lack reliable estimates, however. WHO has recently undertaken an extensive effort to collect and collate data on the unit cost of hospitals and health centres from as many countries as possible; so far, data have been assembled from 49 co...

For many years the hospital industry has been introducing new and improved medical services. The introduction of these services has been responsible for a large part of the increase in hospital care costs. Such services arise largely from the availability of the new medical technology, procedures, and techniques. A simple example is the use of new and expensive drugs and medications. A more dra...