[The intensive care in the German Diagnosis Related Groups-System].

The introduction of a prospective per case reimbursement system in the year 2004 in Germany put the high end intensive care medicine to a considerable financial risk on the basis of risk selection and high maintenance costs. To face this situation, the German Interdisciplinary Union for Intensive Care Medicine (DIVI) suggested to encode intensive care services as a DRG procedure and thus to make them relevant for reimbursement. That is the case now since 2007. The suggested procedure, called " complex intensive care treatment ", is based on a new intensive care scoring system ("Cost Predictor Score") which should quantify the costs per case. This paper provides an introduction into the GR-DRG (German Refined--Diagnosis Related Groups) health care reimbursement system and its financial implications for expensive hospital departments and presents a study carried out in the Anaesthesiological Intensive Care Unit of the Tübingen University Hospital examining the suitability of this new intensive care scoring system.