Comparison of Drugs Use According to Surgical Procedures as Instrument for Budgeting and Improvement of Prescription Efficiency

Abstract

Making an effort to control health expenditure’s escalation, especially in hospital, the Belgian government is planning and experimenting with prospective budgeting. A research financed by the Ministry of Public Health allows us to point out the structure of the pathologies treated as well as other variables included in the medical MBDS like urgency, number of diseased systems, … and explains a high percentage of the variance (62%) in drugs expenditures of the surgical cases. These variables have to be used in order to calibrate hospital drugs budgets. The Interdisciplinary Centre in Health Economics has developed tools to compare drugs prescriptions by type of surgical procedures in order to help hospitals to evaluate their performance should such drugs budgets be progressively introduced.

Key words:

• Drugs evaluation
• hospital comparisons
• APDRGs
• hospital budgeting