Comparative Evaluation of Health Services of Pediatric Neurology Patients Using Fuzzy Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing and Traditional Models

Neurological disorders occur under the conditions when there is perturbation in one part of the brain or the nervous system.  The increasing outbreak of neurological disorders and its high expenses imposed on society have made the necessity to modify the policies of health care. This study calculated the cost of services for pediatric neurology patients to reduce costs.

This quantitative cross-sectional descriptive-analytic case study implemented a Fuzzy Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing(FTDABC) model in treating pediatric neurology patients in 2016. The Wilcoxon nonparametric test was used to test the hypothesis of the research and investigate the significant difference in the cost of services provided to patients in the FTDABC and the traditional costing model.

The results confirmed a meaningful patient services costs in both methods; the cost of patient care using FTDABC model was estimated to be 5,736,843,432 Rials, 41.61% of which goes to overhead and 5.94% goes to idle capacity. Visiting and counseling activities, controlling vital signs, and patient displacement were identified as the most time-consuming activities in the treatment process, respectively.

According to the research findings, it seems necessary to reform human resource management and reduce idle capacity to increase the effectiveness of hospital resources and improve the therapeutic processes. If management can reduce patient displacement activity by 20%, it will result in 2.89% reduction of time and 1.86% of the cost of the treatment process.