Vergütung der Pflege im Krankenhaus: neue Ansätze
The payment of nursing care in hospitals has been under scrutiny for many years. Instruments such as the “nursing complex measure scores” have not succeeded in bringing about appropriate remuneration for nursing care. Ideally, the payment of nursing care should be based on the quality of care provided. However, quality of care is currently not sufficiently measurable. If we assume that the minutes of care provided correlate positively with the quality of care, performance-based models such as LEP could be an option for remuneration. We propose a different pragmatic approach to the remuneration of “bedside care”: the number of minutes of care provided to the patient – differentiated by the level of qualification. They could be billed directly to the health insurers. This would make nursing care more relevant to revenues, thus giving it a much higher status within the hospital. The use of digital technologies makes it easy to measure nursing minutes. Nursing services that are not provided directly to the patient would be reimbursed as part of the DRG. Depending on the availability of quality measurement instruments in nursing, this model can be expanded over time, so that the quality of nursing care can also be remunerated.
Augurzky, B. and S. Finke (2023), Vergütung der Pflege im Krankenhaus: neue Ansätze. In Jürgen Klauber, Jürgen Wasem, Andreas Beivers and Carina Mostert (Hrsg.), Krankenhaus-Report 2023 - Schwerpunkt: Personal. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, 233-250.