BACKGROUND The medical performance evaluation, which provides a basis for rational decision-making, is an important part of medical service research. Current progress with health services reform in China is far from satisfactory, without sufficient regulation. To achieve better progress, an effective tool for evaluating medical performance needs to be established. In view of this, this study at...

Appendectomy is a common and relatively simple procedure to remove an inflamed appendix, but the rate of appendectomy varies widely across Europe. This paper investigates factors that explain differences in resource use for appendectomy. We analysed 106,929 appendectomy patients treated in 939 hospitals in 10 European countries. In stage 1, we tested the performance of three models in explainin...

Cost for clinical treatments has been continuously increasing during the last several years. With 10.8% of GNP in 2003 it became the highest in Europe [1]. In order to overcome this problem, in 2004 reimbursements of hospital services based on disease patterns were introduced by the German government [2]. Under these new reimbursement rules hospitals are no longer reimbursed according to the nu...

In small-area variation analysis, the variation of health care utilization rates, e.g., admission rates, among small areas is calculated. Frequently, the variation of one diagnosis, diagnosis-related group (DRG), or procedure is compared with the variation of another. Unfortunately, the methods generally used to make these comparisons are not consistent. They differ on whether they 1) adjust fo...

OBJECTIVE This paper provides a comprehensive overview of hospital payment systems based on diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) in low- and middle-income countries. It also explores design and implementation issues and the related challenges countries face. METHODS A literature research for papers on DRG-based payment systems in low- and middle-income countries was conducted in English, French an...

Introduction A principal reason for investing in case mix as a tool for hospital administration is that it allows the value of production embodied in an episode of care to be different from the cost of that episode. Useful case-mix evaluation retains a statistical nexus between value and cost of production. The value placed on a hospital system’s output should fit with the aggregate cost of the...

This study was conducted to evaluate the ability of AN-DRG version 3.1 to predict variation in patients' length of stay in hospital (LOS) and identify other factors that can influence the LOS by using routinely collected hospital morbidity data. A total of 18 DRGs that comprised 4,589 episodes were analysed. Multiple regression was used to model length of stay as a function of a number of indep...

The objective of the project was to evaluate a pilot Post Acute Community Care (PACC) program for orthopaedic patients. A series of cross-sectional surveys elicited responses of patient and home carer needs and GP and hospital staff acceptability while a cost-minimisation analysis compared the average cost of the PACC program with general orthopaedic hospital care. Patients were classified acco...

leaves only the biomaterial and hollow channels; SEM of gelatin with extracted PCL (magnification 1.50 KX, scale bar 20 μm) (c); Confocal fluorescent image of a DRG stained with phalloidin rhodamine (actin) after 4 days on the scaffold consisting of gelatin, elastin, and hollow channels (magnificiation 10X, scale bar 200 μm (d); Average aspect ratio of the DRGs on various fibrous scaffolds afte...

Forensic practice fees, billing, and collection procedures are quite different from those in general psychiatry. Most forensic practices have far fewer "clients," and individual bills are usually larger. Collections are usually better (and less frequently discounted) in forensic practice, and resolving billing disputes is far more straightforward. Medicare, Medicaid, other insurance coverage, p...