Developing a standardized healthcare cost data warehouse.

Area of Science:

• Health Services Research
• Health Economics
• Data Science in Healthcare

Background:

• Healthcare value research necessitates accurate cost measurement.
• Existing cost data sources have limitations, and study-specific datasets lack clear methodologies.
• This ambiguity hinders the interpretation of research findings.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a service-level, standardized healthcare cost data warehouse.
• To provide a reliable and interpretable measure of cost from an institutional perspective.
• To include all professional and hospital-billed services for patient cost analysis.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a research infrastructure with linked health records and administrative data from two healthcare providers.
• Integrated data from electronic health records, tumor registries, and disease/treatment registries.
• Employed widely accepted costing methodologies to create standardized, inflation-adjusted costs at the service line level.

Main Results:

• A data warehouse was created containing standardized costs for all professional and hospital-billed services.
• The costing algorithm generates inflation-adjusted, service-line level costs for defined study cohorts.
• The warehouse links patient costs to various health systems and databases.

Conclusions:

• The standardized cost data warehouse enables detailed bottom-up cost analyses without revealing sensitive business information.
• The warehouse is maintainable, expandable, and reduces the need for individual researchers to create custom cost datasets.
• It empowers investigators by providing readily accessible, standardized cost data for defined patient cohorts.