Military nursing and diagnosis-related groups: using the past to benefit our future

To contain the escalating cost of health care, a prospective payment system is being introduced into the military. The authors propose a proactive approach to this change in health care financing by evaluating the experiences of nurses to a similar change in the civilian sector. These approaches are presented as nine interrelated lessons: responding optimistically; shifting into a business mode; valuing clinical nursing experts; understanding the implications for documentation; moving to decentralized management; changing outpatient care delivery; considering the effects on job satisfaction; evaluating the relationship between costs and nursing resource consumption; and basing nursing practice in science.