Abstract Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: None. Background There are limited data on the mechanisms increased healthcare costs among patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). Differences in expenditures at various sites service may provide mechanistic insight into cost differentials between and without AF. Objective To assess for associations device detected AF (ddAF). Methods Us...

Casemix refers to a mix of patients classified in some way. It describes a system which groups patients by predetermined factors into clinically meaningful and resource homogenous groups to describe the hospital or health service product (a measure of output). A number of patient classification (casemix) systems have been developed for various purposes. The casemix system used by Australian acu...

This research focuses upon the relationship between a child's age and the likelihood that the child was treated at a Specialist Children's Hospital rather than at a local hospital. While it is generally regarded that younger patients are more resource intensive, a study was required to determine whether the Specialist Children's Hospitals attracted younger patients. The analysis is based on 42,...

Single ligature nerve constriction (SLNC) is a newly developed animal model for the study of neuropathic pain. SLNC of the rat sciatic nerve induces pain-related behaviors, as well as changes in the expression of neuropeptide tyrosine and the Y(1) receptor in lumbar dorsal root ganglia (DRGs) and spinal cord. In the present study, we have analyzed the expression of another neuropeptide, galanin...

The costing of hospital outputs, and especially of acute admitted patients categorised by DRG, has been the focus of considerable attention in the last decade. Many individual hospitals now routinely estimate the costs of their main products, several State and Territory health authorities undertake periodic multi-site studies, and there have been a few one-off national studies. This paper summa...

Germany will begin a change to per case payment by DRG from January 2003. It has selected the Australian DRG classification as the basis for patient categorisation, in preference to the many other DRG variants around the world. The main aim is increase control over expenditure. We describe some of the reasons for high levels of spending on hospital inpatient care, including the fragmented insur...

The diagnosis related groups (DRG) classification was designed primarily to categorize patients of acute short-stay hospitals in urban areas. As one might expect, many studies have shown it is a less effective predictor of the needs--and consequently the costs of care--of remote and socio-economically disadvantaged communities. One way of improving the equity of funding involves separating the ...

The diagnosis-related groups (DRG's) have classically focused on resources consumed during a hospital stay. DRG's can also be considered categories for describing cases admitted to a hospital. In this article, we illustrate how consistent patterns of variations in admission rates can be used to classify DRG categories according to the Index of Discretionary Admissions. The consistency of variat...

Germany will soon begin per case payment by DRG, and preparations are in progress in most hospitals and insurance companies. The Academic Teaching Hospital Munich-Schwabing in Munich decided to explore coding strategies by considering the impact of diagnoses that could be detected by pathology tests. An Australian database was analysed. We detected "discriminating" diagnoses--that is, diagnoses...