Medicare: short-stay hospital services, by leading diagnosis-related groups, 1983 and 1985.

Assigning a code from any of the diagnosis-related groups to a short-stay hospital discharge covered by Medicare is tantamount to the Medicare payment to the hospital, subject to certain statutory adjustments. Therefore, diagnosis-related groups are the backbone of the prospective payment system implemented October 1, 1983. However, methods employed in the assignment of diagnosis-related groups have changed since the prospective payment system was introduced. The focus of this article is to note some of these changes in methods of assigning diagnosis-related groups, which may have caused some of the migrations, or shifts, from one diagnosis-related group to another during the period 1983-85.