Healthcare Resource Groups (HRGs) offer organisations the ability to understand their activity in terms of the types of patients they care for, and the treatments they undertake. They enable the comparison of activity within and between different organisations and provide an opportunity to benchmark treatments and services to support trend analysis over time.

HRGs are currently used as a means of determining fair and equitable reimbursement for care services delivered by providers. These consistent 'units of currency' support standardised healthcare commissioning across the service.

About this change

The key areas of change in HRG4 are:

• Increased coverage – to a wider group of clinical professions and services
• Revised code structure – the code length has been increased from three characters to five to allow more information to be conveyed and support more detailed analysis
• Cross chapter procedure hierarchies – the list used fro HRG 3.5 has been extensively updated
• Cross chapter primary diagnosis hierarchies – have been introduced
• Multiple trauma HRGs – a new mechanism has been defined to identify high resource, complex treatments associated with multiple trauma cases
• Complications and comorbidities – the complication and comorbidity splits have been improved and each chapter now has its own complication and comorbidity list
• Unbundling – an episode or spell can now be assigned multiple HRGs
• Setting independence – the same HRG may be applied regardless of care setting
• Spell based HRGs – that will cover the whole stay from admission to discharge.

The HRGs are derived from readily available data sources and information that is routinely collected locally. This ensures that the classification is cost effective and does not place a disproportionate burden on users.