An Research On Constructing A Time-driven Activity-based Cost Accounting Model For Medical Service Items In Hospitals

In recent years, the incidents of hospital violence which have occurred frequentlyin our country make the doctor-patient contradiction become the focus in society. Tosolve this problem from the root, the new medical system reform has been made fromthe year of2009.How to account and manage health care costs is one of the mostimportant points in the plan of the reform. But in fact, there are many troubles andblind sides on the medical costs accounting and management in our health careorganizations. For example, people has been no aware that account medical costscorrectly is good for hospital management; for the lack of good method, comprehensiveand accurate cost information cannot be provided for people; the way of medical costaccounting is too simple and rough to go deep into medical service items management.In2004, Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing had been come up with by Robert S.Kaplan who also put forward Activity-Based Costing. Our researchers pay theirattention to this new scientific method in logistics sector for the moment. Through anoverview and analysis of the status of hospital medical cost accounting, this paper pointout its limitations and problems, and propose improving ideas. Then, according to thetime-driven activity-based costing principles this paper propose medical services costaccounting ideas under Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing, build medical servicescost accounting equation under time-driven activity-based costing equation. Thisresearch intends to demonstrate the usefulness of time and cost equations in costmodelling and optimisation of the cost structure in a hospital. For this purpose, weconduct a case study in an upper first-class hospital.From the theoretical analysis and the case study, TDABC could be viewed as aneffective tool to manage hospitals by providing comprehensive and accurate costinformation for hospital. The hospital processes will be studied and translated into timeequations with the respective conditions and restrictions, which will then betransformed into cost equations. Therefore, health care organizations should considerthat strengthen the staffs’ awareness of controlling medical costs and combine TDABCwith traditional method under profitable state to make TDABC more useful and moreeffective.