Lately, hospital studies are applying more and more the
basic principles of ABC to healthcare organizations. Proponents
of ABC argue that it helps healthcare organizations
more accurately understand their costs and helps avoid
suboptimal and often disastrous decisions about prices,
product mix and planning and control [4,6–10]. The core
idea behind ABC is that the production of a cost object (e.g.
products, customers) generates activities which consume
resources (e.g. wages, equipment). More specifically, the
assignment of overhead costs through ABC occurs in two
stages. First, the ABC model relies on resource cost drivers
[7] to assign costs to different activity cost pools (e.g., medical
wage costs are allocated to different activities such as
supervision or delivering nurse care). Second, the further
allocation of costs is performed in a second stage using
activity cost drivers, which measure the demands a cost
object places on an activity [7]. Designing an ABC model
typically involves the steps shown in Panel A of Table 1.
While under traditional cost-accounting systems, overhead
costs are treated as a homogeneous lump sum and are
typically divided by a volume-related base (e.g., the total
number of patient days), the ABC model achieves improved
accuracy in the estimation of costs by using multiple cost
drivers [19]. Additionally, the produced ABC information
makes itmore likely that healthcaremanagers will achievegreater understanding of processes and be more willing to
pursue changes that increase the value and effectiveness of
their organization [6–12].