In early 2020, the Ministry of Health started the implementation of a project financed from EU Structural Funds that will develop a methodology for collecting data on hospital costs and a methodology of calculating hospital costs at the patient level. The purpose is to reliable estimates of the real costs of providing services and thus improving the diagnosis-related group (DRG) system in Romania. Currently, there is no unitary system for collecting cost data related to hospital medical activity, although there have been several previous attempts to implement such a system.
The methodology will be piloted on 50 hospitals nominated by the Ministry of Health.
The results of the project will be used to calculate new relative DRG values for inpatient cases that reflect the Romanian context. This will replace the values used so far, which had been informed by the Australian context and created much dissatisfaction among providers of impatient services and health authorities.