Are costs derived from diagnosis-related groups suitable for use in economic evaluations?
Are costs derived from diagnosis-related groups suitable for use in economic evaluations? A comparison across nine European countries in the European Healthcare and Social Cost Database (Springer).
Economic evaluation of health technologies requires healthcare resources, procedures and services to be valued at their opportunity cost. In practice, many economic evaluation studies use official databases of hospital Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRGs) as inputs where
unit costs are required. This study describes the available data on costs of hospital DRG from official, publicly available sources in nine European countries (England, France,
Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden), critically
examines and compares the methodologies used to construct these databases and
comments on the appropriateness of such unit cost data for economic
evaluation.
[...]
Analysts should evaluate carefully whether DRG costs or tariffs published in
each country are appropriate for use in economic evaluation.
Quelle: Springer, 26.02.2022
