Abstract
Mongolia is undertaking a reform initiative to improve the performance of public organizations. Performance based budgeting, a key component of the reform process, implies that public organizations like state hospitals will have to be funded based on the quality, quantity and costs of outputs delivered to population. This new approach was reinforced by the Public Sector Financial Management Law enacted in 2003.
The implementation of performance based contracting requires accurate data on the unit cost of services by type of service and level of facility. This information was not available in Mongolia across the range of hospitals and the goal of this study is to fill this gap in information..
Cost analysis is an essential tool relating the inputs of resources in monetary terms to the outputs of services provided by the hospital. Timely, reliable and good quality cost information is part of the basic information needed by managers and policy makers for making decisions about how to improve the performance of hospitals and where to allocate the resources within or among hospitals. Also, it allows for performance comparison between different hospitals.
On the request of the Mongolian Ministry of Health, health facility costing exercise was conducted with the technical assistance team from the Asian Development Bank “Support to Health Sector Reform project 4123” The study was organized from March 2004 to March 2005.