England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden spend less as a share of gross domestic product on hospital care than the United States while delivering high-quality services. All five European countries have hospital payment systems based on diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) that classify patients of similar clinical characteristics and comparable costs. Inspired by Medicare's inpatient pr...

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...

BACKGROUND Hospital costs and cost drivers in palliative care are poorly analysed. It remains unknown whether current German Diagnosis-Related Groups, mainly relying on main diagnosis or procedure, reproduce costs adequately. The aim of this study was therefore to analyse costs and reimbursement for inpatient palliative care and to identify relevant cost drivers. METHODS Two-center, standardi...

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 ...