DRGKB: a knowledgebase of worldwide diagnosis-related groups’ practices for comparison, evaluation and knowledge-guided application

Abstract

As a prospective payment method, diagnosis-related groups (DRGs)’s implementation has varying effects on different regions and adopt different case classification systems. Our goal is to build a structured public online knowledgebase describing the worldwide practice of DRGs, which includes systematic indicators for DRGs’ performance assessment. Therefore, we manually collected the qualified literature from PUBMED and constructed DRGKB website. We divided the evaluation indicators into four categories, including (i) medical service quality; (ii) medical service efficiency; (iii) profitability and sustainability; (iv) case grouping ability. Then we carried out descriptive analysis and comprehensive scoring on outcome measurements performance, improvement strategy and specialty performance. At last, the DRGKB finally contains 297 entries. It was found that DRGs generally have a considerable impact on hospital operations, including average length of stay, medical quality and use of medical resources. At the same time, the current DRGs also have many deficiencies, including insufficient reimbursement rates and the ability to classify complex cases. We analyzed these underperforming parts by domain. In conclusion, this research innovatively constructed a knowledgebase to quantify the practice effects of DRGs, analyzed and visualized the development trends and area performance from a comprehensive perspective. This study provides a data-driven research paradigm for following DRGs-related work along with a proposed DRGs evolution model. Availability and implementation: DRGKB is freely available at http://www.sysbio.org.cn/drgkb/. Database URL: http://www.sysbio.org.cn/drgkb/