Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to R F Averill.
This article addresses the introduction of competition into the Medicare prospective payment system (PPS), the application of aa expanded PPS to ensure that Medicare is not paying more than the market price for comparable services, the expansion of the Medicare PPS to outpatient services, and the expansion of the Medicare PPS to physician fees for inpatient care.
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In response to concerns over the equity of diagnosis-related group (DRG)-based prospective payment, the New Jersey Department of Health conducted a Severity of Illness evaluation study in which severity of illness, DRG, and uniform cost information were collected for 76,798 patients in 25 hospitals. Severity of illness was measured using the Computerized Severity Index (CSI) and was found to be a significant determinant of hospital cost in 76 DRGs that accounted for 41.4 percent of the total direct hospital patient care costs and 27 percent of the patients. The addition of CSI severity levels to the 76 DRGs reduced the coefficient of variation of cost in these DRGs by 17.4 percent and improved the overall reduction in variance of cost within the 76 DRGs by 38.2 percent. The change in total hospital payments due to the addition of severity for the 76 DRGs varied from a positive 5.71 percent to a negative 5.48 percent. These results demonstrate that a severity adjustment to this subset of DRGs would result in a more equitable DRG-based prospective payment system.
To address the question of quantification of severity of illness on a wide scale, the Computerized Severity Index (CSI) was developed by a research team at the Johns Hopkins University. This article describes an initial assessment of some aspects of the validity and reliability of the CSI on a sample of 2,378 patients within 27 high-volume DRGs from five teaching hospitals. The 27 DRGs predicted 27% of the variation in LOS, while DRGs adjusted for Admission CSI scores predicted 38% and DRGs adjusted for Maximum CSI scores throughout the hospital stay predicted 54% of this variation. Thus, the Maximum CSI score increased the predictability of DRGs by 100%. We explored the impact of including a 7-day cutoff criterion along with the Maximum CSI score similar to a criterion used in an alternative severity of illness measure. The DRG/Maximum CSI score's predictive power increased to 63% when the 7-day cutoff was added to the CSI definition. The Admission CSI score was used to predict in-hospital mortality and correlated R = 0.603 with mortality. The reliability of Admission and Maximum CSI data collection was high, with agreement of 95% and kappa statistics of 0.88 and 0.90, respectively.
DRG definitions have evolved during the past decade and will continue to evolve as methods for evaluating severity data become available. The use of DRGs for hospital budgeting, payment and evaluation as well as the support of hospital utilization review and quality assurance activities requires that systems be available to insure data quality. A comprehensive and flexible clinical information system will be required by hospitals in order to manage under a DRG system.
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This article describes Ambulatory Visit Groups (AVGs) and the process by which they were defined. An approach to the analysis of physician productivity in the ambulatory setting is then demonstrated, with data derived from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey [1]. Finally, recommendations for future work are presented to make this approach more effective in designing and managing ambulatory care delivery organizations.
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Professional Standards Review Organization (PSRO) operating guidelines recommend the use of Professional Activity Study (PAS) length of stay norms for conducting concurrent review. These norms, determined by aggregating discharge abstracts from PAS hospitals in the same United States census region, are assigned to patients based only on information known at admission. This study investigated the relationship between patient information available at admission and the information available at discharge in light of its effects on the concurrent review process. Analyzing 52,210 patient records from 68 hospitals in one PSRO setting, it was found that changes in patients' primary diagnosis resulted in changes in their PAS diagnostic category for 41.3 per cent of the patients. A change in PAS diagnostic caetgory after the assignment of the review norm resulted in missed and unnecessary reviews as well as early and late reviews. These findings indicate that there are serious operational problems with the current method of performing concurrent review.
This paper outlines the system for cost accounting and managerial control which is an extension of the usually accepted departmental costing systems and takes as its units the 383 Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) considered to be the hospital's products. It is held that such an approach offers hospital managers a more powerful, analytic, budgeting, and cost-finding tool and offers the opportunity to involve the medical staff in the issues of how their practice patterns are affecting hospital costs.
A large portion of the resources of the Professional Standards Review Organization Program have been directed toward the review of inpatients to determine their need for continued hospitalization. The primary goal of this review process is the containment of hospital costs through the elimination of unnecessary patient hospitalization. A cost benefit analysis of this review process shows that the potential financial savings accrued are unlikely to offset the costs associated with the review procedure.