A clinical care costing method.

The Clinical Care Costing Method (CCCM for the Home Health Care Classification (HHCC) System provides an innovative way to determine the cost of clinical nursing practice. This costing methodology consists of three major nursing indicators--Care Components, Actions and Outcomes. These three indicators require Clinical Care Pathways (CCP) to document, track, and code clinical care using the HHCC System. The clinical care costs and/or resources are derived from the time and frequencies of the Action Types for the specific nursing interventions performed by the different type of health care providers to achieve the Outcomes and resolve the Care Component that are used to classify nursing diagnoses/patient problems. This method can also be used to deter-mine the reimbursement for nursing care services retrospectively and once validated prospectively. The Clinical Pathway data provide the evidence that the nursing interventions achieve the desired outcomes.