Economic Cost of Communicable Disease Services in Colorado

In our project, we identify the economic costs associated with Communicable Disease Monitoring/ Surveillance.  To estimate the cost of the selected services, we use a micro-costing approach.  We conduct a series of key informant interviews with workflow diagrams and focus groups to identify major variable and fixed costs associated with the selected services to inform the development of a survey to collect cost data.  To calculate marginal costs, we have staff members keep daily activity logs recording their activities during each 15 minute interval of work over a two week time period. We randomly select both days and hours within each day to fill out the survey to minimize respondent burden. We augment the cost survey with a manager survey asking about the number of FTE’s associated with each activity and also the number of staff hours. We also estimate the capital cost associated with the program using rental costs of similar spaces (or actual rental costs, if applicable).   Methodologically, we estimate a statistical cost function using cost (from the microcosting data) as the dependent variable and independent variables such as characteristics of the agency, the community and services provided. We also engage in a sensitivity analysis of our estimates. The sensitivity analysis will include a comparison of the managerial and activity-log based data and also different fixed cost allocation methods.