OBJECTIVES: Austria's health insurance system is divided into 13 sickness funds. Each fund has its own fee structure with individual names and codes for every procedure performed in an outpatient setting. Outpatient setting includes general practitioners, specialists, ambulatories and institutes. Each sickness fund has general contracts for GPs and specialists while each institute has its own contract. These contracts partly include procedures that are not comparable with any procedures of other sickness funds. Some sickness funds pay physicians and institutes different fees for same procedures. Moreover, the payment depends on the number of procedures performed by a physician or institute within a certain period of time. In order to evaluate procedure data, the so called meta-fee-structure, a set of pre-defined, standardized procedures that are mapped by individual fee-structures, was developed. METHODS: Given data with frequencies and costs of procedures for every sickness fund we are going to propose methods for examining and compare these data: Comparing the cumulative costs, frequencies, the average rates for procedures and the rates for different institutes and physicians paid by different sickness funds. All methods are then applied on real data in the field of radiology. RESULTS: By using this process with real world data it is possible to show the potential of these methods, lacks in data quality and the limitations of the meta-fee structure. Furthermore it is possible to point out proposals where procedure costs should be examined more closely and maybe health care costs could be reduced. CONCLUSIONS: Due to the heterogeneous health care system of Austria there is a wide variety of issues to be addressed when analyzing data. Although the proposed methods are very general they have to be adapted to the actual problems. Knowledge about data origin is crucial when choosing methods to get high quality results.