It is important for health service planning to build up a knowledge of costs within the specialties in hospitals. At present, there is no available accounting procedure which makes these costs directly available, and so they have to be estimated. In this paper, the available ways of achieving this are reviewed for inpatient costs, and a new method based on a biproportional fitting procedure is proposed. The results of the various models are compared and an assessment is made of the potential usefulness of such information in the planning process.
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