[A critical DRG-evaluation of cases with inflammatory bowel disease]

Whether inpatients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are reimbursed in a cost-covering manner in German hospitals has not yet been investigated. In this context, the present study analyses the reimbursement situation (cost-revenue comparison) of IBD in German hospitals with regard to the complexity of the disease and the type of care.

For this retrospective study, anonymized case data, including cost data from the InEK calculation (§ 21-4 KHEntgG) of the DRG project of the German Society for Gastroenterology, Digestive and Metabolic Diseases (DGVS) from 2019, were available. 3385 cases with IBD the as main diagnosis from 49 hospitals were analyzed. To investigate the impact of disease complexity on reimbursement, different variables were analyzed, including gastroenterological complications, infections, the reason for admission, and additional charges. To investigate possible center effects, hospitals were grouped by type of care, mostly defined by the number of beds.

The present study shows that all types of care can be classified as not cost-covering on average. The under-recovery is, on average, 10% (296 € absolute under-recovery) and varies between the types of care. Cases with higher complexity show a higher cost under-recovery than cases with lower complexity. At the DRG level, the analyzed costs of the three most common IBD DRGs for inlier patients are higher than the InEK costs; however, the difference is not significant. Nonetheless, cases with the admission reason transfer of specific DRGs bear significantly higher costs.

Our results show that CED is not reimbursed in a cost-covering manner. This is due to inadequate reimbursement for gastroenterological complications, infections, specific procedures, and emergency and transfer cases. Transfer cases bear significantly higher costs.