Estimating nursing costs--a methodological review.

A critical cost accounting issue relating to nursing costs is that nursing costs are currently averaged into the daily room rate in the hospitals. This accounting practice treats nursing units as cost centers as nursing costs are bundled into a per diem rate instead of billed separately. As a result, all patients in a given care unit of the hospital are presumed to consume the same amount of nursing care resources. This costing and billing system creates a mismatch between resources consumption and billed charges. The objective of this paper is to (1) demonstrate current practice to estimate nursing costs, (2) classify nursing costs into direct and indirect costs in order to refine the existing approaches and (3) argue that a system of billing nursing costs separately better reflects the costs of patient care.