Developing a solid base for a cost accounting system.

: Henry Ford Hospital recently conducted a procedural costing study to determine if more accurate costs for various institutional procedures could be developed. The hospital conducted the study in two phases. The first phase looked at a specific department while phase two took a broader approach and covered the entire institution. This article examines the department-specific phase in which the diagnostic radiology department was selected as the participant. The study concluded that by allocating costs to the procedural level using relative value units and feeding this information into the case-mix system, departmental costs could be accurately identified.