Course ‘Excellence in Chronic Disease Management’

On November 11th, Sigesa participated in the course ‘Excellence in Chronic Disease Management’ organized by ACEMI (Asociación Colombiana de Empresas de Medicina Integral) in Bogotá. Our Technical Director for Latin America, Diego Arribas San Segundo, held a session called ‘Trends in financing models applying DRG and CRG methodologies’ in which he highlighted the importance of chronic disease management and showed the benefits of using population risk-adjustment systems like Clinical Risk Groups.

It is estimated that around 80% of all healthcare resources are spent today in the treatment of chronic diseases. In the face of an ageing population, the prevalence and burden of chronic conditions is expected to rise, so unless its management is improved, we should expect an overall rise in healthcare costs. Studying population morbidity and correctly identifying and tracing individuals with a chronic disease or risk of developing one, should be a priority of health authorities to make healthcare systems sustainable in the long-term.

Clinical Risk Groups, commonly known as CRG, is a population risk-adjustment classification system that can stratify populations based on risk and morbidity, and can help authorities predict the economic impact of high chronic disease risk populations and plan specific preventive and therapeutic measures for them.