Predicting Hospital’s Costs to Treat Emergency Patient

The Accident and Emergency Departments (A&EDs) are responsible for a large share of overall hospitalization, diagnostic activity, and ultimately health care expenditure. Most health care systems use retrospective reimbursement systems to finance A&E departments, but this system may not be efficient. Prospective payments systems would have the advantage to reduce uncertainty both for the purchaser and the provider. In Italy some Regions are starting to use prospective payments systems using triage codes to define the output. In this article we use a unique dataset that allows determining the cost of each patient going through an A&ED to determine whether triage codes can be used for this purpose.