Table 3.

Checklist for methodology of bottom-up costing studies.

Source: own elaboration

Bottom-up costing method Section	Justification/description/examples
Method of collecting resource use
Selection of patients to follow-up	Illustrates how well patient group match research question (external validity)
Selection of number of patient	Provides information related to the precision of the study (internal validity)
Selection of period to follow-up	E.g. hospital episode, 1 year, etc.
Prospective/retrospective	Provides information about the accuracy of the study
Selection of resources to follow-up	Provides information about the accuracy of the study Micro-costing: resources are identified at very detailed level Gross-costing: resources are identified at highly aggregated level
Source of resource use data collection	Describes how were resources used collected. Provides information about the accuracy. E.g. electronic/administrative database, hospital notes, observation, questionnaire, interviews, etc.
Valuing resource use
Method of valuing resource use	E.g. tariffs (public prices), hospital unit costs, national unit costs
Source of data for unit costs	Provides the institution responsible for calculating unit costs, the name of official source of unit costs, etc.
Method of estimating overheads	E.g. direct allocation, step-down allocation, step-down allocation with iterations, simultaneous allocation [1]
Variable overheads included	E.g. laundry, catering, maintenance, etc.
Fixed overheads included	E.g. amortisation of technology, amortisation of building, training and education, insurance, etc.
Analysis
Handling missing data	Considers dropouts from prospective study
Handling of censored data	Considers inpatients that are not discharged before the study finishes