Journal of

Background and Aim: One of the perennial questions for hospitals and insurance organizations are the real cost of g lobal surgery. The aim of this study was to compare the cost of global surgery bills with approved tariffs in hospitals affiliated to Tehran University of Medical Sciences Medical Sciences .

Materials and Methods: This was a cross – sectional study . The study population included all hospitalized patient bills eligible for global tariff at nine selected hospitals (include: Imam Khomeini, Shariati, Arash, Fatemeh Alzahra, Zanan, Cancer Institute and Razi) affiliated to Tehran University of Medical Sciences in 2012. Checklist was used for data collection. Data about the real costs of surgical procedures were collected from the patients' bills . Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics in SPSS version 16 software .

Results: The results showed that a total of 90 included global tariff surgical, 68 surgical procedures were performed in nine selected hospitals. Except seven surgical procedures in other cases (61 cases), the real costs of surgical procedures average 3 -312 percent more than approved global tariff. The surgical procedure "Septoplasty" had the most difference with global tariff.

Conclusion: The results showed that surgical global tariff are not real, and lead to the hospitals financial loss. Therefore, it is recommended that to prevent the hospital financial loss in the calculation of the g lobal t ariff factors such as patient age , presence or absence of comorbidity and complication, disease severity, length of stay and inflation rates in country to be considered .