Calculation of Transfer Discounts

According to the Regeln und Definitionen zur Fallabrechnung unter SwissDRG the transfer discounts (“Verlegungsabschläge”) for transferred patients with a given DRG is calculated like this:

 Transfer discount = daily_transfer_discount * (MLOS - LOS)

where

• daily_transfer_discount is defined by the relevant DRG catalogue
• MLOS is the mean length of stay for the given DRG – but see note below!
• LOS is the length of stay of the given patient case

NOTE: The mean length of stay (“MLOS”) per DRG is given in the catalogue on the SwissDRG homepage, see e.g. here for SwissDRG 7.0.
But the MLOS provided there are rounded to one decimal, whereas the grouper uses the MLOS rounded down to the preceding integer!

This new way to calculate the transfer discount was introduced with SwissDRG 8.0. Section 2.2.3 of the “Bericht zur Weiterentwicklung der SwissDRG Tarifstruktur 8.0” describes the changes in detail:

• deutsch
• français
• italiano

Please note that the application of this updated calculation is mandadory: Grouper users cannot use the old way of calculation, lest they get invalid effective cost weights which differ from the public SwissDRG version.

Example

Given SwissDRG 8.0 and a transferred patient case with

• LOS: 5 days
• DRG: A92B. So according to the catalogue of SwissDRG 8.0:
  • cost weight: 1.151
  • daily transfer discount: 0.115
  • MLOS: 10.8 => grouper uses 10.0

So the transfer discount is

(10 - 5) * 0.115 = 0.575

Therefore the effective cost weight will be

1.151 - 0.575 = 0.576