Payment

     Prospective Payment System (PPS)

     Resource Utilization Groups (RUGs)

The Medicare Part A Prospective Payment System (PPS) is a Resource Utilization Group (RUG) driven payment system that bases payment on responses to the Minimum Data Set (MDS). The 44 - RUG group model is used to determine Medicare payment until January 1, 2006, at which time the expanded 53 - RUG model will become effective.

Additionally, several states base their Medicaid payment on a RUG system. States use either the 34 or the 44 - RUG group model.

Nursing is an art:
and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion
as hard a preparation,
as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble,
compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God's spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts:
I had almost said,
the finest of Fine Arts.

- Florence Nightingale