BACKGROUND To date there have been no studies identifying and comparing the component costs to treat a large number of diseases for hospitalized inpatients. METHODS Hospital costs were analyzed for 486 diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) relating to >1.3 million patient discharges from 60 University Hospital members of the University HealthSystems Consortium. For each DRG, length of stay, total c...

Following sciatic nerve transection in adult rats, a proportion o f injured dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons die, through apoptosis, over the following 6 months. Axotomy also has effects on expression of neurotrophins (NGF, BDNF, and NT-3) and their receptors (trkA, trkB, trkC, and p75NTR) in DRG as shown by in situ hybridisation or Northern blotting. Previous groups showed that administratio...

Co-opting physicians to regulate Fee-for-Service (FFS) payment is more feasible and simpler to administer than capitation, Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRGs) and pay-for-performance. The key lies in designing and revising the fee schedule, which not only defines and sets the fee for each item, but also the conditions of billing. Adherence to these regulations must be strictly audited in order to c...

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...

Knee replacement is a common surgical procedure performed to relieve pain and disability from degenerative osteoarthritis. This study evaluates the ability of ten European diagnosis-related group (DRG) systems to explain variations in costs or in length of stay for knee replacements. We assessed three different models in predicting variation of cost and length of stay. The first model, M(D), in...

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 In 2013, Qatar introduced a national health insurance scheme, called “Seha.” Stage 1 of the scheme covered women aged 12 years and older for health care and maternity services. Stage 2 was launched in 2014, and covered all Qatari nationals for a much broader set of services. In the future, Stages 3 and 4 will extend coverage to all non-Qatari residents within the country as well as v...

This article explains the origins, development, and passage of the single most influential postwar innovation in medical financing: Medicare's prospective payment system (PPS). Inexorably rising medical inflation and deep economic deterioration forced policymakers in the late 1970s to pursue radical reform of Medicare to keep the program from insolvency. Congress and the Reagan administration e...

The German health care system has been based on the Hospital Financing Act, which the German government introduced in 1972. According to that, the federal states plan hospitals and make investments. The health insurance funds finance the operating costs. But now the Hospital Financing Act is obsolete, because both the health insurance funds and the federal states are in financial trouble and tr...

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...