The costs of specialised care

The costs of specialised care

Patients requiring specialised care are usually treated by specialist teams with particular expertise and equipment. Concentrating services in this way should be cost-effective but there is concern that national tariffs might fail to fully reflect the true costs associated with treating patients that require specialised care. This is because the healthcare resource groups (HRGs), used to categorise patients and on which national tariffs are based, may not perfectly differentiate between patients that do and do not receive specialised care. This analysis aims to identify whether or not a patient received specialised care and evaluate whether and by how much such patients have higher costs than those allocated to the same HRG. Centre for Health Economics (CHE)
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