Disorder-related case groups for needs-based hospital care

Abstract

The individual needs of patients are central to hospital care. Due to the resulting complexity grouping of patients with similar therapeutic needs seems to facilitate an efficient organization of processes and the required treatment resources in hospital care. The aim of this study was to develop asystem of disorder-related, treatment-oriented case groups as a possible tool for the efficient and needs-based organization of hospital care. The disorder-related groups were developed in amultistage, mixed-methods design. The technical content and quantitative description of the case groups and the extent of treatment included all consecutive inpatient treatment cases discharged between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2017 from 9psychiatric hospitals in Hesse, Germany. All diagnoses in chapterF of the German modification of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases 10 (ICD-10-GM) were grouped into atotal of 10 disorder-related groups. Analyses included 20,252 inpatient hospital treatment cases. Substantial management-relevant differences between the case groups could be identified and the various case group-specific configurations of clinically relevant comorbidities could be demonstrated. The presented disorder-related grouping system and configuration of comorbidities suggest amodular organization of therapeutic measures and constitute apromising basis for needs-based management of patient care. Future work will show to what degree the disorder-related groups can facilitate aneeds-specific treatment and align economic and therapeutic interests of psychiatric care.