OBJECTIVES: Argentina's health system is fragmented into the public, social security, and private sector. The fragmentation of coverage, the decentralization of health care provision, funding, and competing interests make it difficult to obtain representative data. The objective of this study is to generate a healthcare cost database, representative of each sub-sector of the health system, to contribute to generate heterogeneous and comparable results in economic evaluations and budget impact analyses in Argentina.

METHODS: An exhaustive review of databases, tariff schemes, nomenclatures, official documents, and laws, among other documents, was carried out. For the public sector, tariff schemes were collected from hospitals of different complexity and coverage; for social security, data were obtained from 9 payers with more than 150,000 affiliates; and for the private sector, data were obtained from 5 insurers with more than 300,000 affiliates. All costs were estimated as mean, weighted mean by number of affiliates, median, minimum, maximum, and standard deviations for each of the sectors.

RESULTS: The Unit and Events Cost Database currently includes 100 unit costs for the public sector, 211 for social security and 183 for the private sector. This database includes: inpatient days, diagnostic imaging, laboratory tests, surgeries, medical consultations, and others. Public sector unit costs represent 85-95% of the total sector unit costs, social security unit costs represent 42%, and private sector unit costs represent 75%. In total, the Unit and Events Cost Database represents 67% of the total unit costs of the Argentina's health system.

CONCLUSIONS: The Unit and Events Cost Database generates methodologically robust information that can be used as input for pharmacoeconomic studies that are essential for decision making and resource allocation in Argentina.