The Pathological-numeric Codification of Public Hospitals in Portugal: Implementation of Mechanisms to Support the Assessment Process of Hospital Clinical Records and their Relationship with Funding

The information stated by Public Hospitals to the Central Administration of the Health System, concerning cases of clinical hospitalization, goes through a process of grouping Homogeneous Diagnoses. The “pathological-numeric” codification is a matter of extreme importance for the monitoring of the Contract-Programs, which are, the documental concretization of the financial amounts by production line in each hospital unit. The considered variables in this study embody, simultaneously, the support for the decision in hospital management concerning the control/validation of the clinical processes to codify, serving also assessment criteria for the quality of hospital records. The objectives consist in checking temporal trajectories of Hospitals, over three straight years, in the considered indicators and grouping them, homogenously, into big groups set up on a multidimensional structure that helps get the perception of profiles of hospital production chargeable to the National Health System. The results showed the formation of five groups of Hospitals through the HJ-Biplot technique, which were detected by an Analysis of hierarchical Clusters about the main data of the applied HJ-Biplot spatial configuration