Calculating the costs of training in primary care.

The costs of postgraduate medical education remain a relevant topic for educators and managers as well as for the payors of medical care. Historically, the pervasive problem has been that of identifying education costs in a program that jointly produces patient services and research as well as training. This problem is often approached by an accounting "allocation" of program costs to education. The previous literature on calculating the costs of medical education is reviewed in this paper and the theory related to joint product costing presented as an alternative to the accounting approach. A discussion of the issue centered around an example selected from a teaching hospital outpatient practice is presented.