Dear all,

Thank you for fruitful three days. We took another step ahead and got closer to the start of DRG implementation.

There is still some work to do before that.

As we agreed, we send you the draft DRG Implementation Plan (see attached) so that you can work on that within DRG Working Group. Please find also attached the slides of today's wrap up meeting.

The structure of the plan is based on Core Areas, every area has respective Actions.

Every action has Responsible institution, Responsible person, Involved team, Due date. There is also place for Comments.

We agreed today that DRG WG will now continue the work to fill in the empty boxes behind every action. You may want to add or remove the core areas or actions under every area based on your discussions. Feel free to do this.

One core area in the Implementation Plan is “2. Development of DRG implementation and transition strategy” and respective action “Define the phases of transition with concrete activities and time frames”. That was discussed today, and in principle we agreed that the transition period will be two years and consists of four phases as follows:

•        1^st phase (3 months): SSA preparedness

•        2^nd phase (3-6 months): start with 2 big providers to test IT system, to analyze data quality, give feedback to providers, assess implementation risks

•        3^rd phase (3 months): phase out to all providers

•        4^th phase (6-12 months): “shadow funding”, preparations and simulations for actual reimbursement based on DRGs

NB! Today and yesterday we didn’t have IT people with us and therefore it is important to discuss this transition strategy with them as well which may result some corrections depending on their input.

Furthermore, think about the additional resources (in terms of finances and capacity) you may need for implementation and describe them at the end of the main table or in the “Comments” field. We believe that the main source of additional costs are related to the license fees (can be clarified after the negotiations with Nordic Casemix Centre) and the grouper software.

We agreed today that you will revise the DRG Implementation Plan by 29^th of Nov but it might be good to have Skype call before that. Option is to do that 23.11, 24.11 or 27.11. Please let us know your preference and then we can agree on exact timing. And then we can have another call after 29^th of November and then DRG WG will finalize the implementation plan by 8^th of Dec as the latest.

To contact Nordic Casemix Centre, please visit their webpage http://www.nordcase.org/. The persons to contact are under “Contact us” tab. I would suggest to contact Mr Martti Virtanen who is CEO of NCC and to cc your email also to Ms Maisa Lukander. You can find both email addresses from the webpage (Contact us).

Looking forward to receiving your feedback,

Kristiina