Cost accounting in the EDP-supported chemical laboratory

administration: an analysis of kinds of costs; an analysis of cost centres; and an analysis of bearers of costs. Analysis of kinds of costs The analysis of kinds of costs covers all the hospital’s ’costs divided into eight groups. The left-hand side oftable shows the result of the 1979 analysis. It can be seen that personnel costs amount to 58% of the total and the costs for the annual rate of depreciation of buildings and equipment amount to some 11.5% ofthe total costs. (NB. All costs are in ’cost points’, which do not refer to any particular currency.) The central laboratory’s costs are presented in the righthand side of table 1. The laboratory is responsible for 2.91% of the costs of the hospital. Only 38?/o of the costs of the central laboratory are personnel costs: this is small and a result of mechanization and EDP support.


Introduction
In 1978, cost accounting was made compulsory by law for all Austrian public hospitals [1]. Cost accounting at the Chemical Central Laboratory of the Landeskrankenstalten in Salzburg follows the procedures suggested by the law; it is done by the hospital's administration with the help of electronic dataprocessing (EDP).
The hospital is a teaching hospital with 1600 beds; in addition, there are 700 beds in an affiliated hospital for the mentally ill. The central laboratory carries out all tests requested on blood, urine and other body fluids; the emergency laboratory is part of the central laboratory. Other hospital departments perform haematology, blood group, bacteriology and histology tests. The central laboratory is staffed by three medical doctors, two chemists and 20 technicians.
Three types of cost accounting are performed by the administration: an analysis of kinds of costs; an analysis of cost centres; and an analysis of bearers of costs.

Analysis of kinds of costs
The analysis of kinds of costs covers all the hospital's 'costs divided into eight groups. The left-hand side of table shows the result of the 1979 analysis. It can be seen that personnel costs amount to 58% of the total and the costs for the annual rate of depreciation of buildings and equipment amount to some 11.5% of the total costs. (NB. All costs are in 'cost points', which do not refer to any particular currency.) The central laboratory's costs are presented in the right-

Analysis of cost centres
The hospital is divided into 262 cost centres. In the central laboratory there are 10 cost centrs, eight of which are related to functional sections of the laboratory. All direct costs are charged to these cost centres. Indirect costs are collected from two other cost centres and these are distributed amongst the eight main cost centres according to a special ratio.     from an unequal distribution of the costs on the four groups of tests. The exact analysis of cost shows (table 6) that the variable costs for personnel, and consequently the total costs for the toxicological drug screening, are 40 higher than the costs in the other three groups, whose total costs are nearly equal. The problem can only be solved by introducing an additional cost centre for toxicological drug screening.

Analysis of bearers of costs
In the column 'other costs', the outside overhead costs are included. Up to now they were distributed equally on all central laboratory cost centres. In the tox-icology laboratory they are extremely high per test because the number of tests is very small. In future, the outside overhead costs will be distributed according to the ratio used for inside overhead costs. Consequently there will be a considerable decrease in the 'other costs' per test in the toxicology laboratory and a small increase in other costs for the other cost centres, which carry out more tests.

Distribution of the central laboratory's costs to the hospital's clinical departments
The task of the cost accounting in the hospital is to correctly allocate to patients all costs incurred during their stay. This problem is not yet fully solved in our hospital. The costs of the cost centres of the central laboratory must only be charged to the cost centres who requested the tests. Table 7 shows a survey of the distribution of the costs of the central laboratory to the various clinical departments. The costs per bed and day differ widely--this is due not only to the various medical tasks but also to local situations. The costs per test reflect the variety of tests available, although the range on offer is not excessively large. There is only one exception: the paediatric department requests only expensive emergency tests and microlitre tests.

Conclusions
The cost-accounting system presented in this paper is relatively simple. One of its merits is that it has already worked for three years, and the results of three years can now be compared.
The calculations are sufficiently exact to pass the costs of the laboratory tests on to the patients or on to their respective cost centres. Within the central laboratory, cost accounting gives a good survey of the distribution of costs to the laboratory's functional units. It is an important tool for