Diagnosis-related groups (DRGs)

Experience with IR-DRG in the Sanatorio Americano, FEMI

Abstract

Introduction: the provision for health care services, at the health centers, concentrates most of the resources paid by the health systems and, learning about the productivity of hospitals is essential for the clinical and administrative management. What hospitals produce is referred to as "hospital product".
Diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) are one of the Patient Classification Systems (PCS) more widely used to measure the hospital product.
Information in the medical records of each patient constitutes the source for these classification groups, which comprise a wide range of systems and relate patients’ clinical features to the resources they consumed.
Objective: the purpose of this article is to describe the process for developing and implementing the application of IR-DRGs (International Refined DRGs) at the Sanatorio Americano and to reveal results obtained in the application of this system.
Method: we analyzed the discharges at the Sanatorio Americano that corresponded to patients coming from IAMC (Collective Health Care Institutions) belonging to FEMI (Uruguayan Medical Federation) and other institutions, which hospitalized these patients in the hospital between April-September, 2007.
Results: we obtained the DRGs of the 1,416 discharges, which resulted in 6,872 occupied bed days (OBD) in the different service modalities, with an average length of stay of 4.85 days.
Upon analysis, we found that we can introduce changes to the rendering of services in order to benefit all interested parties within the health care process: patients, referring institution and/or the institutions providing the services, in this case, Sanatorio Americano.
In other words, this means improving efficiency.
Conclusions: our main conclusions are that it is possible to implement the DRG system in our country, that it is a valid system to analyze and re-design the health care process, and that we can perform country- specific variations to the system that are innovative and provide good results, and that its use can be extended to other public and private institutions in our country.