DO DIAGNOSIS-RELATED GROUPS APPROPRIATELY EXPLAIN VARIATIONS IN COSTS AND LENGTH OF STAY OF HIP REPLACEMENT? A COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF DRG SYSTEMS ACROSS 10 EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

This paper assesses the variations in costs and length of stay for hip replacement cases in Austria, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Spain and Sweden and examines the ability of national diagnosis‐related group (DRG) systems to explain the variation in resource use against a set of patient characteristic and treatment specific variables. In total, 195 810 cases clustered in 712 hospitals were analyzed using OLS fixed...