Background: In 2012, Switzerland changed from retrospective to prospective hospital payment based on diagnosis related groups (DRGs), following the example of the United States, Australia, and Germany. As in these countries, the objective of this transition was to motivate hospitals to improve efficiency by making them bear financial risk to some extent.Objective:...

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...

Slovenia is embarking on an ambitious health sector reform program, a small part of which involves implementing the categorization of acute inpatients by DRG for payment purposes. I summarise the leading DRG variants, and describe the process of selecting one of them. I argue that the Slovenian decision to use the Australian DRG variant as a starting point was sensible in terms of cost, speed o...

1. The authors state that they study the impact of a pay-for-performance payment system on quality of care of hip fracture. However, they report that not all hospitals in the study are paid according the DRG payment system linked to performance (page 4). What they compared is the performance of hospitals according to different payment systems. The payment system changed only for a small part of...

Hospital payments under Medicare's prospective payment system (PPS) are based on prices established for 474 diagnosis-related groups (DRG's). Previous analyses using 1981 data demonstrated that DRG prices based on charges alone were not that different from prices calculated from estimated costs. Data for 1986 were used in this study to show that the differences between the two sets of DRG price...

In 2000, Germany selected the Australian DRG system as a base for a national standard German version (now called German DRGs, or simply G-DRGs). No serious consideration has been given thus far to major changes in the classification, because there are many practical issues that must be addressed within a short time-scale, given the German federal government’s requirement that per case payment b...

BACKGROUND New procedures in endoscopy take time to be incorporated in the German diagnosis-related groups (DRG) system. Depending on the extent of innovation and the costs, several pathways are possible. METHODS This article provides an overview of possible pathways to implement new procedures in the German DRG payment system. Additionally, we compare the results of 2 surveys on the system o...

PURPOSE The implementation of the Korean diagnosis-related groups (DRG) payment system has been recently introduced in selected several diseases including appendectomy in Korea. Here, we report the early outcomes with regard to clinical aspects and medical costs of the Korean DRG system for appendectomies in Seoul Metropolitan Government - Seoul National University Boramae Medical Center throug...

Medicare has introduced a number of new payment initiatives that will have a profound effect on hospital reimbursement and quality and safety ratings. The new medical severity diagnosis-related group (MS-DRG) payment system adds a number of new DRG categories to more adequately account for patient severity. The new present-on-admission (POA) initiative is designed to withhold additional reimbur...