national pricing programme
The National Pricing Program (NPP)
This is a joint program undertaken by the Ministry of Health and District Health Boards which has the responsibility of recommending inter-district flow prices for services in public hospitals. The NPP data is used to construct sets of comparative DHB information and advance work on key pricing areas such as ED, maternity services, and other specific service areas from time to time. It is also used to support other processes including service specification development and the work of the Common Costing and Common Counting Groups.
Specific elements of the NPP program include components of the wider hospital funding model, such as:
· Casemix cost weights;
· The tertiary adjuster pool, its size and its distribution;
· Reviews of prices for non-casemix funded services; and
· Development of a price book for all services where an IDF price is needed.
This work is based on annual collections of public hospital costs data, some of which is collected at event level, while for those DHBs without a costing system aggregate cost data is collected.
This is a large collection with significant alternative uses in areas such as benchmarking and performance improvement. It is regarded as valuable to DHBs that this data be available to pursue further possible benefits. DHB CEOS have agreed principles for the sharing of data, which can be accessed here. This document also contains an application for authorised access to this data.