Abstract:

Background: Workforce, technology, and regulatory reasons are driving up hospital prices worldwide, endangering access to care. Although difficult, effective cost control is crucial.

Objective: To review financial and administrative strategies for hospital cost control, examining evidence from recent literature, case studies, and official data.

Methods: Narrative analysis of official, peer-reviewed sources (health system reports, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar). "Hospital cost control," "healthcare budgeting," "lean healthcare," and other terms were used in the search. Financial planning, costing systems, supply chain, personnel management, process improvement, HIT, and policy impacts were all covered in the research and evaluations we included up until 2026. Non-hospital settings are excluded.

Results: Hospital cost structures are dominated by labour (about 50-60% of budgets) [1] and consumables. Financial solutions such as zero-based budgeting and advanced costing (e.g., Activity-Based Costing, ABC) offer frameworks for identifying waste. Improving revenue cycle and group purchasing can recover approximately 1-3% of revenue and 5-15% of supplier expenses, respectively. Administrative levers, including as workforce optimisation, task shifting, and clinician-managed efficiency programs, can help to reduce overtime and error costs. Process improvements using Lean/Six Sigma have yielded modest average savings (~1.7% of revenue) but larger effects in focused pilots (25–50% reduction in targeted cost categories).

Quality improvements (reduced readmissions, safety) reduce needless expenses. Digital solutions, like as EHRs, telemedicine, and AI, can improve efficiency and resource utilisation (e.g., remote monitoring reduced readmissions by ~23% in one program). All-payer/global budget models and regulated pricing can also limit growth by aligning incentives [2]. Key case studies from China, Poland, the United States, and other countries demonstrate that hospitals that actively regulate inputs, procedures, and overheads (with engaged leadership) outperform their peers.

Conclusions: A combination of financial discipline, lean administration, technology adoption and supportive policy can enable hospitals to control costs. Strategies must be tailored to the context, involve clinicians, and monitor both savings and quality. We provide evidence-based recommendations for hospital managers and policymakers on implementing these strategies in practice.

Keywords:

Hospital Cost Control, Healthcare Financial Management, Lean Healthcare, Revenue Cycle Management, Healthcare Technology and Efficiency.

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Methods