This paper examines the behaviour of public hospitals in response to the average payment incentives created by price changes for patients classified in different diagnosis-related groups (DRGs). Using panel data on public hospitals located within the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, we test whether a 1-year increase in DRG prices induced public hospitals to increase their volume of activity an...

The Post-Acute Acuity Rating for Children (PAARC) is the first known acuity rating intended to reflect medical severity based on age, reason for admission, diagnoses, dependence in activities of daily living, and technology reliance for children admitted to post-acute care rehabilitation hospitals. Content validity was tested using an expert panel scoring the Content Validity Index (CVI). Concu...

The beginning of the transition to a new Medicare payment system will culmin ate nearly a decade of efforts to reform Medicare’s physician payment system. From the start, the AMA has played a leadership role. The AMA has viewed Medicare adoption of a payment schedule based upon a Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) as a means of preserving fee-for-service as a viable Medicare option, an...

BACKGROUND Iatrogenic injuries are relatively common and a potentially avoidable source of morbidity. The economic evaluation of this area has been limited by the lack of good quality national data to provide an estimate of incidence, associated disability, and preventability of iatrogenic injuries. Two recent surveys, the Quality in Australian Health Care Study (QAHCS) and the Utah Colorado St...

OBJECTIVE In many industrialised countries, health care third party payers are moving towards contracted provision arrangements with suppliers of hospital care. Essential to such a process is a standard approach to quantifying the care provided. This paper aims to outline the possible approaches to hospital product definition for the UK National Health Service, and recommends appropriate furthe...

As coded clinical data are used in a variety of areas (e.g. health services funding, epidemiology, health sciences research), coding errors have the potential to produce far-reaching consequences. In this study the causes and consequences of miscoding were reviewed. In particular, the impact of miscoding due to inadequate medical documentation on hospital funding was examined. Appropriate reimb...

BACKGROUND In flat-rate reimbursement systems, the hospital's own costs should not exceed its revenues. In a cohort of primary breast cancer (pBC) patients, costs and reimbursement for febrile neutropenia (FN) were compared to verify cost coverage. METHODS A prospective, observational study in pBC patients receiving adjuvant anthracycline ± taxane-based chemotherapy calculated the costs per i...

Patients requiring transfusion medicine and hemotherapy in an inpatient setting are incorporated into the German Diagnosis Related Groups (G-DRG) system in multiple ways. Different DRGs exist in Major Diagnostic Category 16 for patients that have been admitted for the treatment of a condition from the field of transfusion medicine. However, the reimbursement might be not cost covering for many ...

BACKGROUND As soon as Diagnosis related Groups (DRG) were introduced in many hospital financing systems, most nursing research revealed that DRG were not very homogeneous with regard to nursing care. However, few studies are based on All Patient refined Diagnosis related Groups (APR-DRGs) and few of them use recent data. Objectives of this study are: (1) to evaluate if nursing activity is homog...

BACKGROUND Limited information is available on the epidemiology and economics of bleeding during surgery in France. METHOD The objective of this study was to examine the incidence, costs and length of stay (LOS) of bleeding-related complications during various surgical procedures. RESULTS Amongst all 88 different surgical DRGs recognised by the French database 24 (totalling 321,657 hospital...