At What Cost? We’re on a journey to find the answer.

We know Capital Health is a community of people who provide excellent health care. The unknown is how much that care costs.  With an uncertain economic climate, escalating health care spending and an aging population, it’s more important than ever for us to find out. To that end, Capital Health is bringing case costing to the organization.

Read: More to health costs than meets the eye: An editorial in the Chronicle herald by Amanda Whitewood, VP Sustainablity & Chief Finacial Officer.

What Exactly is Case Costing?

It’s an accounting method that captures our full cost of specific procedures and episodes of care by calculating all direct and indirect costs. The numbers can answer a host of questions: for example,

• How much does a knee replacement cost at Capital Health?
• How does that compare with the procedure done elsewhere and how do outcomes compare?
• How can we use that information to improve care? 

Over the next three years, Capital Health will apply case costing to all clinical areas. Within that timeline, we will employ the standards and practices that enable us to case cost: MIS, appropriate cost allocation and workload measurement. Planning and working teams will provide support for each of these case costing components.

What Case Costing Means for Capital Health

Case costing is a long-term journey with twists, turns and bumps - and ultimately benefits we will all share. As we implement the practical steps toward case costing, we will also take greater steps to reposition and strengthen our ethical and evidence-informed decision making. We will gain a better understanding of the services we provide, when, for whom, by whom and at what cost. We will use this information and knowledge to make comparisons, to do analysis, to evaluate, to make decisions, to make changes. Along the way, we will move from “We think...” to “We know...”

From the floors to the meeting rooms to the boardrooms at Capital Health, when we are faced with a dilemma, we will have the information we need to make the best decisions possible. When asked why, we will provide sound reasoning supported by solid evidence. When we think there is a better way, we will have the facts to make the strongest case for change. When the change is made, we will evaluate it thoroughly and effectively.

Our Role

The role of the planning and working teams is to make the case costing journey as smooth as possible. The role for all of us is to take the journey.