A Developed Method for Handling Uncertainty in Activity - Based Costing for Hospital Services Using Fuzzy Approach

Today, hospitals have faced many requests for quality services, while their costs are increasingly growing as well. These facts; Therefore, necessitate much more attention from hospital mangers in order to reduce healthcare costs. Moreover, the urgent need for a precise costing approach is more evident. Activity-based costing provides useful information on the activities required to achieve services with desirable quality. However, given that the basic information for ABC system is provided under conditions of certainty, the possibility of using this approach in terms of uncertainty would be greatly decreased. This study aims to propose a new framework called FL-ABC. Since, costing processes environment happen under conditions of uncertainty in the hospital, fuzzy logic in the ABC model was used in order to make more accurate estimates of hospital costs and increase the reliability of the results. This proposed model was used in a hospital lab unit and the results were compared with the standard ABC system. The results showed that the maximum difference in the prescribed costs was 77708951.89 and 67508112.57 IRR in serology and parasitology tests, respectively, mostly due to uncertainty in the assigned costs to each activity. The FL-ABC system, in terms of taking into account the uncertainty in the parameters of cost, provides more accurate estimates of the cost of activities under conditions of uncertainty which estimates the costs of health care services more accurately.