Case Mix

Case mix describes what kind of work a hospital actually does. Two hospitals of identical size can have entirely different case mixes: one doing routine obstetrics and paediatrics, another doing cardiac surgery and oncology. Almost every comparative metric — revenue per occupied bed, length of stay, cost per case — is more a statement about case mix than about efficiency.

Why it matters in a hospital

This is the reason benchmark figures mislead. A small hospital comparing its revenue per bed against a corporate chain's is comparing case mixes, not performance, and concluding it is underperforming by a factor of ten. Understanding your own case mix is more useful than any external comparison: it tells you which specialties carry the hospital, where the beds actually go, and what a new consultant would change. It is also the first thing that has to be measurable before any of those decisions can be made on evidence.

How Trisvio handles it

Trisvio reports activity by department and by doctor, and revenue attributed to the encounter, so the shape of the work is readable from the system. Without coded diagnoses it stops short of clinical case-mix grouping.