[The weighted health care unit: a new tool for hospital budgeting]

Hospital budgets must be based on estimated workload in order to fairly distribute available financial resources. A tool to measure hospital production is need to achieve this aim. We present in this article the results of a study on hospital cost which was carried out to design a new unit for measuring intermediate hospital products: the Weighted Health Care Unit (Unidad Ponderada Asistencial: UPA). Thereafter we use multiple regression to find out structure, services and activity variables which explain the variations in expenses per UPA among 64 hospitals of INSALUD. Significant variables include: doctors per hospital bed, hospital staff (sanitary personnel except doctors plus administrative assistants) per bed, hospital size (less than 200 beds), ICU beds percentage, oncology service, UPAs per bed average length of stay. These variables, along with interactions between them, explain 91.4% of the variance of expenses per UPA. The UPA and statistical modeling allow a better understanding of hospital expenses and can be very useful in coordinating budgets to hospital activity taking into account the different characteristics of each hospital.