The purpose of this paper is to analyze the German diagnosis related groups (G-DRG) cost accounting scheme by assessing its resource allocation at hospital level and its tariff calculation at national level. First, the paper reviews and assesses the three steps in the G-DRG resource allocation...

Nowadays different healthcare policies in OECD countries seem to consider hospital readmissions somehow “quality dependent”. Nonetheless, the theoretical literature on the incentives provided by payment systems tend to disregard this aspect, which indeed might be relevant in driving...

In 2003, Japan introduced the prospective payment system (PPS) with diagnosis-related groups (DRG) rearranged grouping system called the diagnostic procedure combination/per-diem payment system (DPC/PDPS). Even after eight years, little is known about the effects of DPC/PDPS. The purpose of this...

This paper studies how the change from retrospective cost-based reimbursement to a prospective payment system shifted hospital investment strategies from quality-enhancing technologies to cost-saving technologies. A consequence of this change was the opportunity for for-profit hospitals to...

We estimate the degree of supplier-induced demand for newborn treatment by exploiting changes in reimbursement arising from the introduction of the partial prospective payment system (PPS) in Japan. Under the partial PPS, neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) utilization became relatively more...

Prospective payment arrangements are now the main form of hospital funding in most developed countries. An essential component of such arrangements is the classification system used to differentiate patients according to their expected resource requirements. In this article we describe the...

This paper examines the behaviour of mental health care providers in response to marginal payment incentives induced by a discontinuous per diem reimbursement schedule with varying tariff rates over the length of stay. The analyses use administrative data on 12,627 cases treated in 82...

The objective of this paper is to provide a description and analysis of the main costing and pricing (reimbursement) systems employed by hospitals in the Spanish National Health System (NHS). Hospitals cost calculations are mostly based on a full costing approach as opposite to other systems...