Activity-Based Costing of Mobile Health Checks at Private Hospitals in Lamphun Province

Abstract

 Activity-based costing is an important issue for hospital and nursing administrators in order to manage resource utilization in service provision. This descriptive study aims to analyze the activity-based cost of general health examinations via mobile health check administered by private hospitals in Lamphun Province, and to compare the activity-based cost of general health examinations via mobile health checks with the price of health checks that private hospitals have determined. The sample for the study was the activities of general health examinations via mobile health checks between August 1, 2018 and September 30, 2018. The conceptual framework used Activity-Based Costing introduced by Kaplan and Cooper (1998) and composed of four steps: 1) develop the activity dictionary; 2) determine how much the organization is spending on each of its activities; 3) identify the organization’s products, services, and customers; and 4) select activity cost drivers that link activity costs to the organization’s products, services, and customers. The instruments used in this study were developed by the investigator and consisted of the activity dictionary, time spent record form for activities, and data record forms for labor costs, material costs and capital costs. All instruments were confirmed for content validity by three experts, and the inter-rater reliability of the two data collectors was 1.0. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics.

          Results revealed that:

1. The activity-based cost of a general health examination via mobile health check was 297.94 THB, of which labor costs accounted for 206.83 THB; materials costs, 76.09 THB; and capital costs, 15.02 THB. The ratio of labor to materials to capital costs was 69.40:25.50:5.10.  
2. The activity-based cost of a general health examination via mobile health check was 27.94 THB higher than the per capita rate determined by private hospitals.

           Hospital and nursing administrators can use the cost data from this study to calculate the break-even analysis and consider the efficacy of resource utilization in mobile health checks.