The real costs of health care and their
economic assessment have been expressed with a great urgency in an expanding
dimension. In order to consider the value-based outcomes when measuring value,
very accurate knowledge about health care delivery costs is required. The
allocation of the rather scarce resources within public health care is of great
importance in order to better utilize the resources without lowering care
quality. The approach of this paper is multi-disciplinary, representing the
field of health economics. The focus is in the assessment and evaluation of the
costs of different simulation imaging modalities used in radiation therapy (RT)
workflow. In this study, the costs of the computed tomography (CT) and the
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are observed. In order to investigate the
expenses as accurately as possible, the time-driven activity-based costing
(TDABC) is applied as a research method. The specific aim of this study is to
find out potential advantages of the MRI-only simulation, as this method is not
very widely applied in RT. This study is a research-in-progress, presenting
only the theoretical argumentation and methods, meanwhile the collection and
processing of the empirical data is in progress. The research is continuing,
and the empirical findings will be added to the theoretical framework in a
separate paper.