Incorporating cost measurement into health service delivery to promote value-based maternity care: A guide for health administrative data use
Emily Callander, Yanan Hu, Valerie Slavin, Maria Forslund, Jenny Gamble, Joanne EnticottService context:
Promoting value-based maternity care requires maternity services to actively monitor costs and outcomes, where value is defined as patient outcomes achieved relative to the costs of care, rather than focusing solely on cost minimisation.
Aim:
This study aimed to present an applied, real-world example of how linked health administrative and clinical cost data can be accessed, managed, and analysed, and to demonstrate their use in evaluating health service value within a value-based care framework.
Practice innovation:
To facilitate broader adoption, we provide fully annotated open-source code and detailed documentation to guide researchers in applying this approach to their own administrative perinatal data.
Lessons learned:
Reporting and analysing costs should be an ongoing part of service delivery and are enabled by the vast amounts of data that are routinely collected.
Conclusion:
This study demonstrates how to measure costs of the entire pregnancy journey using existing administrative data and to implement this as a system-wide, routine monitoring metric at the health system level or even whole of state/country level to support benchmarking.
Implications for health information management practice:
Better utilising existing routinely collected health data can support maternity services to implement cost measurement as a part of performance monitoring, identifying areas of service delivery that are high and low value, and evaluating any changes in service delivery into routine practice.