The implementation of patient-level information and costing system PLICS in the NHS has supported by the department of health since 2009,
Patient-level information and costing system PLICS help healthcare services providers to capture better and more accurate cost information at each stage of a patient’s journey with detailed information about how resources are used at the patient level for example Staff, drugs & diagnostic Tests.
Patient-level information and costing systems PLICS brings together healthcare activity information with financial information in one place, and here are some features of (PLICS):
1- Calculates the cost of hospital service delivery to measure business performance
2- Develop and implement one single national cost collection to replace current multiple collections
3- Calculates public and private revenue streams using sophisticated business rules
4- Integrated with many different applications via data connections.
5- Monitors hospital performance through regularly generated reports that are distributed through email
In addition, here are some reasons answering why hospitals need to use patient-level information and costing system:
1- Enhanced the ability to understand financial divers, enabling cost benchmarking for the patient, specialty, and hospital level.
2- Improves clinical ownership of costs that would enable a comparison of the cost profiles of different clinics for similar patient
3- Gives a detailed knowledge of individual patient costs to inform patient classification, rather than reliance on the average cost
4- for chronic conditions, such as cancer, heart diseases, and diabetes tracking patient pathways has been advocated for decades but PLICS can potentially cost 1 year of care across organizational boundaries by identifying the direct and indirect costs associated with all the events, procedures, and clinical interactions for individual patients.
In Conclusion:
Hospitals and clinics should use patient-level information and costing systems to increase awareness of costs, improve patient outcomes by linking safety and quality, allow decision-makers to focus on high-profit service items, and analyze low profit or loss service items in a hospital and decrease the time spent organization billing and collecting payments.
