Cost Behavior of Private University Hospital in Korea

사립대학병원의 원가행태

This study aims at providing necessary informations for management decision-making to the hospital manager, such as ratios of fixed and variable cost to total operating expense, and variable cost ratio to operating revenues, and determinant factors affecting cost behavior. A study model and related hypotheses were established, data were collected from 41 private university hospitals for the 6years from 1998 to 2003, and regression analyses were performed to test the hypotheses. The results of the analyses and conclusions are as follows; First, labor cost and administration cost within the same number of beds have not only fixed quality of the cost, but variable quality of that. Also, the ratio of the variable costs to operating revenue of the metropolitan was estimated 76.9% and that of other area hospitals was 80.1%. Second, the major factors affecting the increase rate of the operating expense were the increase rates of the number of inpatients, the number of employee, and the number of hospital operating bed. This result implies that maintaining a optimal hospital bed size and efficient operation of the beds are important strategic factors of hospital management.