NANO Patient level information & Costing system (PLICS)
Patient Level Information and Costing System
If you are paid per episode, you need to know what an episode costs
Under a classification-based funding model the payment for an episode is fixed before you deliver it. That makes one question decisive, and most hospitals cannot answer it: what did this episode actually cost us? Without that number, a service line that quietly loses money looks exactly like one that quietly makes it.
NANO PLICS answers it at the level where care is actually delivered. It brings clinical and financial data together from the systems that already hold them and attributes real consumption — staff time, drugs, diagnostic tests, theatre — to the individual patient episode, rather than spreading departmental averages across everyone.
Costing at that level turns budgeting into evidence. Paired with NANO DRG, which produces the classification the payment attaches to, you can compare what an episode earned against what it consumed — by specialty, by consultant, by procedure.
Features
- Automates the costing process and measures business performance, so cost-saving opportunities are identified rather than estimated
- Runs multiple cost models side by side on one cloud platform
- Implements standard operating procedures for patient-level costing
- Manages the whole costing model — allocations and matching rules — from a single interface
- Monitors performance through scheduled reports distributed by email, with a reporting structure you can shape to the question you are asking
- Uses international costing standards, so national and regulatory returns are a by-product rather than a project
- Does not require SQL skills to operate day to day
- Builds data-driven reports, presentations and documents by linking to the tools finance already uses (Microsoft Office, Google Drive)
Benefits
- Cost data becomes a management information system rather than a year-end exercise
- Clear visuals that make an outlier visible instead of buried in a table
- Better resource decisions, because the data behind them can be traced and verified
- State and national costing returns submitted with far less manual preparation
- Current processing and analytics technology, without a rebuild
- Cloud-optimised: faster deployment, automatic updates, always-on monitoring, flexible capacity
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Related products
Products in the suite that work alongside this one.
More about this product
How this works with the rest of the suite
- NANO DRG
The grouper produces the classification the payment attaches to; costing produces what the episode consumed. Together they tell you which service lines earn.
- Value-Based Healthcare Solution
Value is outcome over cost, so a value-based contract is unmeasurable until cost is known per patient rather than per department.
- NANO Reports
Costing produces the numbers; scheduled reporting is how they reach the people who can act on them.
- NANO DDI
Patient-level cost is one of the richest analytical datasets a hospital owns, and it repays being queried rather than only reported.
Frequently asked questions
What is patient-level costing?
- Working out what an individual patient episode consumed, rather than dividing a department budget by the number of patients who passed through it. The difference is decisive: with averages, a service line that quietly loses money looks exactly like one that quietly makes it.
Why does DRG funding make this urgent?
- Under a classification-based funding model the payment for an episode is fixed before you deliver it. That makes one question decisive, and most hospitals cannot answer it: what did this episode actually cost? Without that number there is no way to tell a profitable case mix from an unprofitable one until the year has closed.
What can we compare once we have it?
- What an episode earned against what it consumed — by specialty, by consultant, by procedure. That comparison is the whole point, and it is only available when grouping and costing are both present: one gives the revenue side, the other the cost side, for the same episode.
Do our finance people need SQL?
- No. The costing model, its allocations and its matching rules are managed from a single interface, and reports, presentations and documents are built by linking to the tools finance already uses. Requiring a query language would have put the system back in the hands of the people who already have the data.
Does it help with national costing returns?
- It uses international costing standards, so state and national returns become a by-product of running the model rather than a separate preparation project. That is usually where the manual effort was going.