Approach To Map Health Cost Drivers

The WHO universal health coverage cube separates population, service, and cost coverage, yet at the point of care the three arrive as one episode: an entitlement, a service, and a claim met from public funds. This paper proposes the episode-of-care window, with a prespecified index episode and accumulation window, as the common unit of analysis. Within the window, each dimension is operationalised as a vector: Entitlement for population (eleven variables, from age to days in hospital), Service Delivery for service (six cost categories, kept separate), and Reimbursement for cost coverage (insurance status, a binary non-cost variable). The three vectors enter one Gamma generalised linear model with a log link to Direct Medical Costs, the episode's total cost. The exponentiated coefficients form the health cost driver map: the weight each variable carries within one episode. Applied to 125 household episodes of advanced cardiovascular care, procedure costs carry the largest z, with pharmacy, ICU, test and laboratory costs, disease type, prior disease, days in hospital, and discharge type significant; consultation fee and insurance are not. A separate robust run on the Entitlement and Reimbursement vectors is reported. The map is offered to ministries, insurers, and international bodies as a shared place to stand, informing their conversation without settling it, with each country bringing its own content. Keywords: Universal Health Coverage Cube; Episode of Care Window; Bottom-Up Unit Micro-Costing; Generalized Linear Modelling; Health Cost Drivers.