Hospital cost for patients with HIV infection in a university hospital in The Netherlands.

Precise data on the utilization of health care facilities by HIV infected patients are generally not available. Nor are there data on the related cost, effectiveness and efficiency of the treatment provided. This is due mainly to the lack of a suitable method for recording demographic, medical and financial data on individual patients in hospitals. For this reason we have been developing a system of data collection, which provides a detailed cost record of each patient. The application of this system for 52 patients with HIV infection treated in a university hospital over a two-year period showed that for a patient with AIDS the mean cost of inpatient and outpatient hospital services was $19,507 per person-year. For patients with HIV infections other than AIDS the mean costs ranged from $1,769 for CDC III patients to $2,064 for CDC II patients (expressed in 1987 US dollars). Continued operation of the registration system will make it possible to analyze the causal background of costs as well as the cost-effectiveness of the treatment.