Comparison of drugs use according to surgical procedures as instrument forbudgeting and improvement of prescription efficiency

Making an effort to control health expenditure's escalation, especially in hospital, the Belgian government is planning and experimenting with prospec tive budgeting. A research financed by the Ministry of Public Health allows us to point out the structure of the pathologies treated as well as other variables included in the medical MBDS like urgency, number of diseased sys tems,... and explains a high percentage of the variance (62%) in drugs expe nditures of the surgical cases. These variables have to be used in order to calibrate hospital drugs budgets. The Interdisciplinary Centre in Health E conomics has developed tools to compare drugs prescriptions by type of surg ical procedures in order to help hospitals to evaluate their performance sh ould such drugs budgets be progressively introduced.