OBJECTIVES To assess how diagnosis-related group-based (DRG-based) hospital payment systems in 12 European countries participating in the EuroDRG project pay and incorporate technological innovation. METHODS A standardized questionnaire was used to guide comprehensive DRG system descriptions. Researchers from each country reviewed relevant materials to complete the questionnaire and drafted s...

BACKGROUND/AIM Global budget per calendar year is a traditional method of funding hospitals in Serbia. Diagnose related groups (DGR) is a method of hospital payment based on classification of patients into groups with clinically similar problems and similar utilization of hospital resources. The aim of this study was to compare current methods of hospital services payment with the projected cos...

In Germany, there are about 2100 hospitals providing care for about 17 million inpatient cases per year.3 Hospitals are financed through a system of ‘dual financing’, which means that they receive funds from two different sources: infrastructure investments are covered directly by tax-funded state budgets, whereas operating costs are paid mostly by sickness funds and private health insurers.4 T...

Policy makers have been trying to replace Medicare's fee-for-service payment system for years with approaches that pay one price for an aggregation of services. The intent is to reward providers for offering needed care in the most appropriate and cost-effective manner. Medicare's first payment change designed to accomplish such a change was the hospital prospective payment system, introduced d...

The input prices indexes used in part to set payment rates for Medicare inpatient hospital services in both prospective payment system (PPS) and PPS-excluded hospitals were rebased from 1982 to 1987 beginning with payments for fiscal year 1991. In this article, the issues and evidence used to determine the composition of the revised hospital input price indexes are discussed. One issue is the n...

BACKGROUND United States health care spending rose rapidly in the 2000s, after a period of temporary slowdown in the 1990s. However, the description of the overall trend and the understanding of the underlying drivers of this trend are very limited. This study investigates how well historical hospital cost/revenue drivers explain the recent hospital spending trend in the 2000s, and how importan...

This article presents a system under consideration by the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) for incorporating a measure of severity of illness into the Medicare diagnosis-related groups (DRGs). DRG assignment is one of the main factors in determining the payment made for hospital inpatient services furnished to Medicare beneficiaries. Specifically, the formula used to calculate paymen...

The primary aim of the research reported here is to examine elements of the theory of social organizations as adaptive systems as derived from Roy's model by investigating the ability of hospital payment source to predict length-of-stay. A retrospective review was conducted of 3,297 records of patients discharged under 1 of 10 frequently occurring diagnosis-related-groups. Two groups were forme...