Resource Costs and Reference Costs

The Pathway costs and the Tariffs they drive have been designed to be setting independent and to account for the ‘ground-up’ cost of delivering the care described in the pathway. Therefore all the resource costs used to build them up have been stripped of Market Forces Factor and other location specific skews. Resources were costed from British National Formulary, suppliers in the South West of England and published Department of Health salary scales.

Clinical staff costs were calculated as a cost per minute of on clinical available time (defined as time available to deliver the care in the costed Pathways). Staff costs included on costs.

A series of Standard Staff Blends have been used in many pathways to recognise the fact that senior staff are required to be present in clinics but there maybe insufficient patient volume to utilise them efficiently ie in the pathway pricing we account for the fact a Doctor likely to take a blood sample, a job a nurse might expect to do.

Use of significant capital equipment was costed on a case-by-case basis, usually allowing for discounted full life cost per minute of use.
Overheads were estimated at 30% of total costs and distributed by applying them to clinical staff costs.

This data is collated in Pathway Analytics Cost Model toolkit that allows for easy management and update of resources costs as they change.