Professor Frank Keane:

The coding system used in the hospital inpatient inquiry system is an Australian system of coding. When patients come into hospital, basic demographics such as age and address and all that sort of stuff is obtained. Then they are coded by diagnosis, in other words, pneumonia, heart attack, cancer or whatever is their code. That is one of the coding systems. The other coding system is for whatever procedure they have. Every procedure for which a person comes into hospital is given a code, from a scan to an operative procedure. All those codes are different. It is possible to interrogate that to find out how many cases of a specific procedure were carried out. That is all fed into a system that creates what we call DRGs. These are diagnostic related groups. That is how the system is funded. There are about 690 diagnostics groups. That is what is used for the funding process.