[Clinical pathways from an economic viewpoint]

The fundamental change in basic conditions requires the establishment of structural concepts and clinical guidelines for German hospitals. Activity-based costing and process management are ideally suited to cope with these challenges.Activity-based costing is oriented toward detailed consideration of special processes. This enables a detailed apportionment of resource consumption to the particular steps in a process. In that way total costs can be determined by their proximate cause. The information gained serves as a basis for strategic and operational decisions within the framework of subsequent effective process management. The favoured aim, in particular, is the contemporaneous realization of an improvement in quality, service and competition as well as cost cutting and time saving. This study presents a practice-oriented implementation concept of process costing for the DRG I16Z. The systematic method described can also be applied to further DRG calculations.