Yardley can help you dramatically improve your costing process where it needs it most - your cost standards.  Our capabilities now include the most experienced standards development expert you will find anywhere.  Coupling this experience with an improved approach, we can educate and work with your department managers to develop or revise your standards in record time.  The approach is easier to maintain and more credible.  Give us a try on one of your departments and see for yourself.

It doesn't matter if you use TRENDSTAR, HPM, or even third part products, costing is a cornerstone management application in a tough environment, supporting:

1)     Service line profit and loss analysis

2)     Defensible services pricing

3)     Economically informed clinical decision making

4)     Contract and payor performance assessment

5)     Understanding indirect cost sources

Cost information is only as strong as its weakest link.  If the foundations of costing are not sound, the cost information may be wrong, and may lead to wrong conclusions.  A common example of dissatisfaction with cost information is attempting to use the cost information to set prices, when the cost is determined through allocations based on price.  Another is finding that overhead allocations are out of date or not rational as you drill down for supporting detail for a critical decision.

The time to tune up your cost accounting is not when the information is in highest demand.  Costing is best done in advance, so as to make the costing process a natural part of your management information flow.

To better support our customers as they face a changing marketplace, Yardley has put together several services to help to ensure you have reasonable and maintainable costing information.

1)     Process Assessment:  Evaluate your current state costing, including cost structures, GL and service item detail and standards, with specific recommendations for improvements.

2)     Process Redesign: Leverage as much as possible your current costing implementation while building a best-practices costing design, including robust component and overhead allocation area definition to support improved visibility of the overhead allocations and improved direct cost absorption..

3)     Cost Standards Development: A new approach to developing cost standards, the drivers for how your cost system works.  This is an area many hospitals have ignored, but it is key to building a credible costing system.

Using Yardley for Cost Standards Development

 The weakest link in any cost system are the standards.  To rectify this, Yardley has developed a new high-tech, high-touch approach that is ideal for estimating the cost of providing patient care.  Our process is based on three principles:

1)     The clinical staff knows best how resource intensive it is to provide a specific service.

2)     These same managers want to participate in the process, if it were only easier and less time consuming to do so.

3)     The value achieved from a simple, sustainable approach to estimating cost far exceeds the utility of a complex process which is not maintained.

Yardley begins with jargon free education on the process of estimating the cost of providing patient care.  We work one-on-one with managers to understanding their departments' operations and facilitate gathering their input. 

 Next, we provide a novel approach to entering the standards, so that managers can immediately see how the information they provide will be translated into an estimate of the cost of providing a service.  You may choose to utilize either HPM's distributed, model worksheet capability or our own tools to distribute worksheets to managers with baseline data, which managers can then alter and submit back for review.  Once reviewed by the costing staff, the data is applied to the service items for use in allocating cost.

Yardley's services also make it easy to move your standards to a new system when you are upgrading or migrating to a new system.

We work with individual managers on their worksheets as needed using our web meeting service, so we can coach them as they provide the estimates.  Once managers see how easy the process is, they become active in their support of the process.  More frequent review of the standards becomes a cinch by simply sending the worksheets out for subsequent input by managers.

In summary, Yardley provides a sustainable process framework for a more transparent costing process.  Sustainable because it is easy, transparent and ensures participation.  Sustainable so that the information will not get stale, because it is so easy to review and correct.  The result is the most accurate and credible cost information available, developed with the help of your own departmental experts.

Yardley's Standards Collection:

Yardley sets up the worksheet, prepares databases with baseline data, trains staff on worksheet and distribution, and oversees the distribution.

Yardley works with costing staff and department managers to ensure successful education and completion of the worksheets, and use of the standards in the costing process.

For More Information email or call us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , '; document.write( '' ); document.write( addy_text41028 ); document.write( '<\/a>' ); //-->\n This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it 215-321-9197