Healthcare Resource Groups
Develops a standard for Healthcare Resource Groups as groupings of clinically similar treatments which use comparable levels of healthcare resource.
About this standard
- Publisher
- NHS England
- Reference code
- ISB0070
- Publication date
- 01/08/2008
- Publication version
- 4.0.0
- Status
- Active
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Active. Active standards are stable, maintained and have been approved, assured or endorsed for use by qualified bodies.
Deprecated Deprecated standards are available for use and are maintained, but are being phased out, so new functionality will not be added.
Retired standards Retired standards are not being maintained or supported and should not be used.
- Standard type
- Information standards
Show definitions of standard types
Collections. A Collection is a systematic gathering of a specified selection of data or information for a particular stated purpose from existing records held within health and care systems and electronic devices.
Extractions. An extraction is a type of collection that is pulled from an operational system by the data controller and transmitted to the receiver without additional processing or transcription by the sender.
Information standards. Information standards are agreed ways of doing something, written down as a set of precise criteria so they can be used as rules, guidelines, or definitions.
Technical Standards and specifications. Technical standards and specifications specify how to make information available technically including how the data is structured and transported.
- Contact point
Link to standard
- Documentation
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- Conformance date
- 01/04/2009
Topics and care settings
- Topic
- Data definitions and terminologies
- Reference data
- Care setting
- Community health
- Hospital
- Maternity
- Mental health
- Urgent and Emergency Care
Dependencies and related standards
- Dependencies
The principal data sources from which HRG4 groupings are derived are:
- Admitted Patient Care Commissioning Data Set (CDS) DAPB0092
- Outpatient Attendance Commissioning Data Set (CDS) DAPB0092
- Accident and Emergency Commissioning Data Set (CDS) DAPB0092 (For Emergency Medicine HRGs)
- Critical Care Minimum Data Set ISB0153
- Paediatric Critical Care Minimum Data Set SCCI0076
- Neonatal Critical Care Minimum Data Set SCCI0075
- Admitted Patient Care Commissioning Data Set (CDS)
Review Information
- Approval date
- 23/07/2008
Legal basis and endorsements
- Legal authority
Section 250 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012
This information standard is published under section 250 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012
More information
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.
Page last updated: 03 May 2024