The PECUNIA Reference Unit Cost Templates (PECUNIA RUC Templates) are a Microsoft Excel©-based set of tools that enable researchers to calculate unit costs comparable across countries and sectors (so called Reference Unit Costs (RUCs)) using standardized and scientifically validated methods. The templates cover all essential steps from collecting data to calculating the RUCs, e.g. the monetary value of an average service per unit of analysis (e.g. per contact, per day), as well as adjusting for inflation and conversion of currencies. They are consistent with the harmonised PECUNIA Costing Concept (PECUNIA Care Atom, PECUNIA Service Lists, PECUNIA Coding System) and therefore with other PECUNIA Costing Tools (PECUNIA RUC Compendium, PECUNIA RUM Instrument) to achieve comparability by referring to content rather than linguistic equivalence of services and other resource items.
In total, there are six PECUNIA RUC Templates designed for developing RUCs in different sectors in any country affected by the (spill-over) effects of health interventions:
Five out of the six templates also contain additional data collection sheets, while an extra SERVICE RAW data sheet can be used for the harmonised aggregation of data collected from multiple sources.
The templates were developed in English by the scientific partners of the PECUNIA Consortium between 2019 and June 2021.
Registration and access/permission
Anyone wishing to use the PECUNIA RUC Templates for non-commercial research, healthcare and academic teaching activities can do so free-of-charge following registration. Please complete the Registration Form and return it to pecunia@meduniwien.ac.at. You need either Adobe Acrobat Reader or any other programme that can read a pdf File in order to open and fill out the Registration Form. Once registered, you will receive a link via email to download the PECUNIA RUC Templates and the corresponding user guide. If you have any questions about using the PECUNIA RUC Templates or have troubles with downloading it via the provided link, please contact us via email at pecunia@meduniwien.ac.at.
In case of interest for the commercial use of the PECUNIA RUC Templates, please contact the developers via e-mail at pecunia@meduniwien.ac.at at first.
The use of the PECUNIA RUC Templates is free for non-commercial purposes and is conditional upon sharing the calculated RUCs with the wider research community via the PECUNIA RUC Compendium, and citation of the PECUNIA RUC Templates in any resulting work/publication as follows: