This is one of the three major categories of cost in Hospice.
Patient-Related Costs - Costs such as Medications, Medical Supplies, Therapies, DME, etc. Sometimes they are referred to as Ancillary Costs. Other Patient-Related costs are: Ambulance, Bio-Hazardous Waste, Clinical Mobile Phones, Clinical Pagers, Lab, Outpatient, Mileage, etc.
Hospice Homecare:
Cost Category | Average | Acceptable | Excellent |
---|---|---|---|
Total Patient-Related | 18% | 17% | 16% |
Inpatient Unit:
Cost Category | Average | Acceptable |
---|---|---|
Total Patient-Related | 14% | 12% |
Many people equate high cost with high quality. This is flawed thinking. Just because you spend 25% of your Net Patient Revenue on medications does NOT mean that patients are getting better care. It simply means that your Hospice is wasting money. The SAME outcome could be achieved at two-thirds LESS cost. The same lesson applies to Direct Labor as well as to other Patient-Related costs.
MVI encourages the use of Percentages of Net Patient Revenue (NPR %) rather than Patient-Day costs for Hospice financial measurement. This deviates from traditional Hospice practice.
For more detail on what Percentages of Net Patient Revenue is, and why/how a Hospice should use it rather than Patient-Day costs, click here.