Cost Revenue Analysis Plus Tool
Cost Revenue Analysis (CORE Plus) Tool is a spreadsheet-based tool developed to help determine projected and actual costs of integrated primary health care services broken down by individual interventions. It is a “bottom-up” costing tool that allows the user to estimate a standard cost for each intervention, broken down by drugs, tests, medical supplies and staff. The standard costs are multiplied by the number of each type of intervention to build the total direct costs for a facility to which are allocated indirect costs.
The tool also allows users to estimate service utilization based on a catchment population and to compare it with actual service utilization. Costs can be easily compared for different numbers of patients and different service delivery models.
A strength of the tool is to be able to predict the cost of different numbers of particular interventions, such as child survival, within the context of an integrated primary health care system, and the impact of changes in those interventions on the cost of the system as a whole. The tool has been used in many countries, including South Africa, where it was used to estimate the total cost of primary health care package for the Ministry of Health.
