By The Nuffield Trust (September 2012)
This report examines how, in an era of financial challenge, NHS trusts can make better use of cost information at the patient level, as the first step towards greater efficiency. The challenge faced by the NHS of achieving major efficiency savings highlights the desirability of improving the availability and scrutiny of data on the costs and outcomes of health care. Patient-level costing systems (or ‘PLICS’) were introduced in the NHS in the mid-2000s. This report highlights the key findings of a full report looking at the use of these computerised information systems in hospitals that were set up to track and enable analysis of the costs of care incurred by individual patients. The report examines whether the implementation of information systems for patient-level costing might lead to greater efficiencies.