Die Rehabilitation
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Clinical practice guidelines are relevant to all parties involved in the health system. For rehabilitation under the German pension insurance scheme, there are two main aspects: the integration of rehabilitation into the curative guidelines in terms of "local tailoring" on the one hand and the development of guidelines for rehabilitative processes, demand-oriented control of rehabilitation access, and rehabilitative aftercare on the other hand. The elaboration of effective standards is aimed at avoiding over-provision, under-provision or misdirected provision of care and, simultaneously, at ensuring that quality assured treatment is offered to the rehabilitees. ⋯ There are many initiatives by the providers of rehabilitation as well as the scientific medical societies to develop and implement rehabilitative clinical practice guidelines, e. g. the guidelines programme of the BfA (Federal Insurance Institute for Salaried Employees), which is aimed at developing rehabilitation process guidelines for selected indications, the guidelines activities of the VDR (Federation of German Pension Insurance Institutes), and the input of the "Guidelines" commission of the DGRW (German Society of Rehabilitation Science). It is hoped that in the years to come the parties involved in German health care provision will be open to the advantages of clinical practice guidelines. Rehabilitation under the German pension insurance scheme, with respect to its experience with quality assurance, its responsibilities for structure and concept and a growing acceptance on the part of care providers, already holds a well-founded starting position.
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The recommendations for aftercare listed in discharge reports represent a core component of communication between inpatient psychosomatic rehabilitation and ambulatory follow-up care. The standardized discharge report used by the pension insurance institutes makes use of a generic category system for systematization and simplification of recommendations for aftercare. Neither the practice of making recommendations for aftercare as observed by therapists and physicians responsible for treatment in the inpatient setting nor the appropriateness and differentiation of the category system has previously been systematically examined. A randomized sample of discharge reports was analyzed for this purpose. ⋯ The results give some support for the clinical validity of the form of recommendations given for aftercare measures in an inpatient psychosomatic rehabilitation setting. At the same time, the analyses indicate excessive as well as insufficient differentiation in the generic category system for follow-up treatment recommendations, which could lead to a loss of valuable information at the interface between inpatient and outpatient treatments.
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Guidelines are a means to support effective clinical practice and can be used to implement evidence-based medicine in rehabilitative practice. In 1998 a study on cardiac rehabilitation, funded by Bundesversicherungsanstalt für Angestellte, BfA, concluded that the AHCPR's Guideline on Cardiac Rehabilitation published in 1995 could be used as a reference guideline for the rehabilitation of coronary patients. The AHCPR Guideline and other systematic reviews showed cardiac rehabilitation to be an effective means in coronary care. However, no detailed information is given with regard to the structural and processual details that are required for a multidimensional and comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation scheme. To define those central characteristics, therapeutic interventions that had been proven to be effective for cardiac rehabilitation were analysed. The information derived from these analyses will then be used to develop a more detailed evidence-based guideline. ⋯ Despite limitations in report quality and methodology in some of the studies included, a detailed analysis of the interventions investigated can be used to substantiate optimal cardiac rehabilitation. It is possible to quantify important characteristics of the main elements and to define lower and upper limits of treatment. While formulating these limits, it is intended to maintain compatibility with the BfA Classification of therapeutic measures in medical rehabilitation (KTL). As a next step the data from the KTL statistics will be used to assess the scope of German rehabilitative care to define areas which do not comply with the limits defined in the guideline. The results will be consented with experts from science and clinical practice in order to develop an evidence-based, empirically founded, practicable and acceptable guideline for cardiac rehabilitation.
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Up to now, the majority of rehabilitative measures in Germany has been performed in inpatient programmes. In the past 10 years an extension of outpatient rehabilitation can be noted. Because of new social welfare legislation the legal disadvantages for participants in outpatient rehabilitation have been eliminated on the 1st July 2001. ⋯ In some regions there is a strong cooperation between pension insurance institutes and corresponding health insurance companies in order to extend outpatient rehabilitation. A quality assurance program for outpatient rehabilitation will be developed. It can be expected, that the extension of outpatient rehabilitation goes on and that thereby the possibilities of a more flexible medical rehabilitation grow.
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With the statutory health insurance reform act 2000 the German government started to introduce a new hospital funding system based on an internationally used diagnosis related groups (DRGs) system. In June 2000 the German self-administration board (consisting of the German hospital federation, the German statutory health insurance funds and the association of private health insurers), which is in charge of realizing this project, decided to develop the future German (Refined) DRG System (G-DRG) with reference to the Australian Refined DRG System (AR-DRG) Version 4.1. ⋯ The new reimbursement system is intended to not only cover acute hospital care but also parts of early rehabilitation, palliative and sub-acute care. Because of its economic incentives the effects of DRG introduction in Germany will not only be limited to the hospital scene but will also affect rehabilitation.