Developing actual costs of patient services: the University of Alberta Hospitals.

Analysis of the costs of diagnostic and therapeutic services provided to patients yields a multitude of useful results: a sophisticated tool to assist in streamlining the underlying processes of patient care; an improved understanding of the nature and extent of case-based resource requirements; maximization of existing patient information collected through various feeder systems; a key step in the direction of measuring quality and the cost of quality, when linked to patient outcomes realization of the strategic significance of information management in today's complex, data-intensive health industry.