Enlightenment of the DRG payment reform in the United States on the reform of China′s medical insurance payment methods / 中华医院管理杂志

In order to curb the excessive growth of medical expenses, the United States has initiated payment reform of diagnosis-related groups (DRG) since 1983, and developed a series of complementary measures to address issues such as overcoding and declining healthcare service quality which were exposed during the reform. The authors discussed the implementation of DRG payment reform in the United States, namely the case-mix specialization of medical institutions and the reduction of costs, as well as the relationship between the two. On this basis, the authors suggested that when implementing reforms to the medical insurance payment system in China, it is imperative to avoid such loopholes as overcoding by medical institutions and excessive pursuit of efficiency at the expense of quality control, as well as the decline of comprehensive rescue capability and quality of care incurred by the exacerbated specialization.

The Impact of Hospital Specialization on Length of Stay per Case and Hospital Charge per Case / 보건행정학회지

BACKGROUND: Over the last few decades, because hospitals in South Korea also have undergone dramatic changes, Korean hospitals traditionally have provided specialized health care services in the health care market. Inner Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (IHI) measures hospital caseloads based on patient proportions, independent of patient volumes. However, IHI that rely solely on patient proportions might be problematic for larger hospitals that provide a high number of diagnosis categories, as the patient proportions in each category are naturally relatively smaller in such hospitals. Therefore, recently developed novel measure, category medical specialization (CMS) is based on patient volumes as well as patient proportions. METHODS: we examine the distribution of hospital specialization score by hospital size and investigate association between each hospital specialization and length of stay per case and hospital cost per case using Korean National Health Insurance Service-cohort sample data from 2002 to 2013. RESULTS: Our results show that IHI show a decreasing trend according to the number of beds and hospital type but CMS show an increasing trend according to the number of beds and hospital type. Further, inpatients admitted at hospitals with higher IHI and CMS had a shorter length of stay per case (IHI: B=-0.104, p<0.0001; CMS: B=-0.044, p=0.001) and inpatients admitted at hospitals with higher IHI and CMS had a shorter hospital cost per case (IHI: B=-0.110, p=0.002; CMS: B=-0.118, p=<0.0001). CONCLUSION: this study may help hospital policymakers and hospital administrators to understand the effects of hospital specialization strategy on hospital performance under recent changes in the Korean health care environment.