News / 60 hospitals lead the way with PLICS data
The Department of Health will take another step towards using patient-level cost data to inform the tariff when it assesses data from hospitals leading the way in patient level information and costing systems (PLICS) this September.
Speaking to Healthcare Finance, Peter Donnelly (pictured above), head of costing and classification at the Department, said patient level costing was now moving steadily ahead. Some 60 trusts have told the Department they are in a position from the beginning of this month to start deriving PLICS costs. A further 80 trusts have indicated that they are seriously considering PLICS.
‘At the end of September, we would seek to get six months’ costs from those 60 hospitals with their self-assessment of their quality score,’ Mr Donnelly said.
The trusts with systems in place have all attended Department seminars recently at which Mr Donnelly has been stressing the need for quality. ‘PLICS needs to be demonstrably good data,’ he said.
While reference costs remain unaudited, new PLICS standards issued in February include a tool that will enable trusts to self-assess the quality of their costing systems and allocation methods by assigning a materiality and quality score (MAQS).
Mr Donnelly said that the Department would not wait until it had 100% of hospitals able to submit patient level data before using it to inform the tariff.
‘We will take a representative sample in the same manner that countries like Germany, Canada and Australia do,’ he said.
However, he stressed that initially data would be used to compare with reference costs and inform the tariff. ‘We wont use PLICS to set the tariff until we are sure of the quality standard and that we have a representative sample,’ he said.
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Manual for prescription The Department of Health has published a more prescriptive costing manual and promised the move to greater prescription on costing will continue as financial flow reforms develop. The Department made no apologies for dictating how costs should be treated. ‘This is key if there is to be sufficient consistency to allow robust comparison and decision making using this data,’ it said. It explained that the national tariff, based on the national average costs collected through reference costs returns, meant there was a need for robust, reliable costing information. Chris Raspin, development manager at the Audit Commission, which provides advice to NHS bodies on analysing and understanding their reference costs, said it made sense to reduce the scope for inconsistency. However he said the new costing rules combined with the introduction of more detailed healthcare resource groups under HRG4 would add to the complexity of the costing process. Trusts needed to have the resources to meet the increased prescription and complexity of the costing process to avoid them cutting corners. The Department of Health has recently raised the possibility with the commission of auditing reference cost data. The costing process has been audited before in a one-off exercise in 2003. |
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