Author Description

This dissertation, "Systematic Review of the Impacts of Diagnosis Related Groups and the Challenges of the Implementation in Mainland China" by Fei, Gao,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: 1.1 Background: Since Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) systems were firstly introduced in USA in 1983, they have begun to be implemented in more developed countries and some developing countries among the world during two decades. As one of the prospective payment systems, it focuses on enhancing the efficiency through reduction in the length of stays in hospitals, and improves the health care services by decreasing and controlling the unnecessary treatments. This paper reviewed the impacts of DRGs both in the countries with long period's implementation and in China, including the above beneficial outcomes and negative influences in health care delivery. Furthermore, considering the current concerns of health care delivery in Mainland China, this paper discussed the difficulties and challenges in widely implementation over the whole country. 1.2 Methods: This study focused on the published papers in English through Pubmed, Google scholar, Google and in Chinese through CNKI. The articles in Chinese were searched from 1994. A literature search of all articles was conducted using keywords such as DRGs, impacts, efficiency, and quality both in English and in Chinese, so that relevant studies had been chosen according to the aims of the review. 1.3 Result: This review revealed the beneficial outcomes within health care delivery after the implementation of DRGs, which focused on the decrease i