Search

In order to assess the medical activity and the related costs, the French Ministry of Health has designed a relative value scale for medical procedures, the Relative Complexity Index (RCI). The RCI for anaesthesiology, called BETA, is the result of the combination of four subindexes: T for the type of anaesthesia, D for the duration, C for the related surgical procedure, and EG for the patient's status according to the ASA scale. The goal of this study has been to test whether the BETA index was actually an acceptable indicator of the direct cost of an anaesthetic. We have determined the cost of 248 procedures in a teaching hospital and achieved a statistical analysis of the relationship between costs, RCI and the various subindexes. The mean cost of an anaesthetic was 1,205 FF (SD = 1,325), 61.4% of which being for salaries. The cost of a general anaesthetic was 2.5 times higher than the cost of a local/regional anaesthesia procedure. Mean cost was around 700 FF for ENT, urology, gynaecology and obstetrics, 1,200 FF for orthopaedia and visceral surgery, and 5,130 FF for cardiac surgery (not including the equipment for extracorporeal circulation). A strong positive relation was found between the BETA and cost (r = 0.90, p < 10(-4)). The best predictive model of cost was log-linear, using only the duration, the type of anaesthetic and the related surgical procedure. The patient's status was not a significant factor, nevertheless in our sample, ASA 4 patients had a significantly higher cost than others (p = 0.0004, Mann & Whitney test).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

The French health policy PMSI project (Program for a Medical Information System) is mainly aimed at development of cost analysis based on diagnosis related groups. An indicator of the relative costs of anaesthetics, the relative complexity index (ICR beta), was defined as the result of a computation of different indexes of surgical and anaesthetic procedures such as duration, patients ASA status, degree of emergency, stay in the recovery room. The aims of this study were 1) to analyze relative part of each index in ICR beta value and in ICR beta variance and 2) to assess the value of ICR beta as a cost or a complexity index. The study included 14,435 anaesthetics analyzed with the Dunn and Clarks multiple linear regression. Mean ICR beta was 267.28. The duration of the procedure accounted for 46% of the ICR beta value and surgery for 25%. The anaesthesia and the recovery accounted for 15% of the ICR beta value, but only for 0.0341 and 0.0347 respectively of the ICR beta variance. The product of the surgical procedure index by the ASA status index accounted for 0.259 of the ICR beta variance and the duration index for 0.650. The comparison of homogeneous groups with regard to the surgical procedure shows that intravenous anaesthesia accounts for 12.4% of the ICR beta value, inhalational anaesthesia for 13.84%, but exceeds 15% for regional anaesthesia (44.5% for caudal anaesthesia). For appendectomies (n = 114) duration index is still an important parameter in ICR beta variance (delta R2 = 0.354) but equivalent to the emergency index (delta R2 = 0.363).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)