Monitor wants to shift the basis on which Payment by Results prices are calculated away from average costs and towards the actual cost of treating individual patients. Its report, Costing Patient Care: Monitor’s approach to costing and cost collection for price setting, says: ‘Costing Patient Care sets out our proposed approach to improving the quality of cost data on which prices are based. We propose to improve the methodology for costing, and the collection and assurance of cost data. At the heart of our approach is a proposal to collect Patient-Level Information and Costing System (PLICS) data.
‘We believe this has the potential to deliver more accurate and granular data, and open up opportunities for more sophisticated methods of price setting. An increasing number of providers now have PLICS; 80% of all NHS and Foundation Trusts have implemented, are implementing or are planning to implement these systems.
‘Moving to a pricing system using PLICS data is a long-term aspiration which will take time to implement. In the meantime, data collected through the current method (reference costs) will be used. Reference cost data therefore continues to play an important role and so we also set out proposals to improve the quality of this data.’
