Patient Organization demands the elimination of the so called "clinical pathways"

The "clinical pathways" should be repealed as a tool for funding hospitals in 2013 and the financial scheme should switch to diagnostic related groups (DRGs), insisted on Wednesday the Federation of Bulgarian Patient Forum. The Patients' Organisation mentioned several recent cases whereby patients have become victims as a result of the existing payments to hospitals.
"Patients are not a "clinical pathway" and this notion cannot determine how long they can live," stated Ivan Dimitrov from the Federation of Bulgarian Patient Forum. In his words, Bulgarian patients are treated as numbers of the relevant pathway, according to which hospitals are paid, regardless of whether they have been cured or not.
Hospitals strive to report the maximum number of DRGs funded by the National Health Insurance Fund. The patient actually becomes a marketing unit and the healing establishments have no interest in keeping the patients hospitalised more than five days since they would incur cost overruns. "For this reason, patients with severe or chronic diseases are undesirable for admission into hospitals," explained the Federation.
Very often, patients were deprived of expensive therapeutic procedures and medical tests required for their diagnosis because the hospital could not afford these, or they reported expensive tests that were not really implemented. There were even cases of unnecessary hospitalisations or preemptive discharging of patients since NHIF does not pay for re-hospitalisation under the same or similar DRG of the same patient in the same 30 days period.

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