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...

Introduction Healthcare systems in the early 1970s, the so called 'golden age' of the welfare state, came much closer to what we characterize as distinct ideal types: the Private Insurance System, the Social Insurance System and the National Health Service (NHS). During the past decades, as a consequence of problem pressure caused, for example, by globalization and demographic change, healthcar...

The aim was to investigate the accuracy of clinical information coding and the financial consequence for trauma patients at a tertiary trauma centre using the resources of trauma nursing case managers. Clinical data for admitted trauma patients in August and September 2000 were compared with data routinely obtained by trauma case managers on their daily rounds. We audited patient injuries, in-h...

Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) systems across Europe are very heterogeneous, in particular because of different classification variables and algorithms as well as costing methodologies. But, given the challenge of increasing patient mobility within Europe, health systems are forced to incorporate a common patient classification language in order to compare and identify similar patients e.g. for ...

History Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) were developed in the late 1960s by American researchers in response to the rising cost of health care. DRGs provide a finance and patient classification system using diagnosis, type of treatment, age and other related factors as the screening criteria. Hospitals are paid a predetermined amount of money for treating patients from a given DRG, regardless o...

PURPOSE Previous studies have examined the effects of hospitalists in urban academic hospitals. We compared the outcomes of patients treated by hospitalists with those of patients treated by internists at a 647-bed rural community hospital. SUBJECTS AND METHODS The 443 patients in the hospitalists' 10 most common diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) were compared with 1,681 patients in the same DR...

This paper inquires into the effects that Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) have had on the ability to explain patient-level costs in a specialist paediatrics hospital. Two hedonic models are estimated using 1996/97 New Children's Hospital (NCH) patient level cost data, one with and one without a casemix index (CMI). The results show that the inclusion of a casemix index as an explanatory variabl...