Creating standard cost measures across integrated health care delivery systems

Background: Economic analyses are increasingly important in medical research. Accuracy often requires that they include large, diverse populations, which requires data from multiple sources. The diffi culty is in making the data comparable across different settings. This article focuses on how to create compa-rable measures of health care resource use and cost using data from seven health plans and delivery systems participating in the Cancer Research Network’s HMOs Investigating Tobacco study. Methods: We used a data inventory to identify variation in data capture across sites and used data dictionaries to develop algorithms for assigning standardized cost to the three major components of health care use: outpatient, inpatient, and pharmacy. Results: The plans included in this study varied from fully integrated, closed-panel models to plans and delivery systems that include network or independen