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Traditionally, the finance department has assumed responsibility for assessing process costs in healthcare organizations. To enhance process-improvement efforts, however, many healthcare providers need to include clinical staff in process cost analysis. Although clinical staff often use electronic spreadsheets to model the cost of specific processes, PC-based animated-simulation tools offer two major advantages over spreadsheets: they allow clinicians to interact more easily with the costing model so that it more closely represents the process being modeled, and they represent cost output as a cost range rather than as a single cost estimate, thereby providing more useful information for decision making.
Historically, the functions associated with understanding, controlling, and avoiding costs in a healthcare organization were almost solely the responsibility of the finance department. In recent years, however, increasing cost pressures have made it necessary for all of a healthcare organization's staff to play a role in controlling costs. Clinical staff, in particular, often can provide insight into cost-related details of clinical processes that financial managers might easily overlook.
This organizationwide sharing of responsibility for cost control has led to the adoption of new PC-based tools to develop cost information that can be used by both financial and nonfinancial staff. Many healthcare organizations have adopted electronic spreadsheets, and most clinical personnel are familiar with these applications. Until recently, however, healthcare organizations have been slow to adopt sophisticated process-simulation applications, largely because of their complexity. The next generation of simulation software offers an increasingly user-friendly means to perform activity-based costing through animated displays, point-and-click model building. and automated output.
An animated process-simulation application facilitates involvement of clinical professionals in process costing by presenting information in user-friendly ways. For example, the application can provide a representation of the physical layout of the area in which the process is performed (eg, the radiology area of an emergency department). Within this display, the data analyst can create graphic images of the various clinical and support personnel and plot their activities, such as movement from room to room or extended presence in one room to perform various activities (eg, MRI examination).
Output values, such as waiting room contents or minutes wait time, can be displayed on-screen while the model is running. The application depicts the process within a time frame that...