Abstract
In 2003 the mandatory introduction of diagnosis related groups as an overall payment system started for all hospitals in Germany, except for departments of psychiatry and psychotherapy as well as psychosomatics and psychotherapy. All hospitals are legally obliged to deliver extensive data on hospital treatment, including demographic data, diagnoses, comorbidities, complications, and procedures, to the "Institute for the Hospital Remuneration System" which uses the data for yearly adaptation of the German DRG system (G-DRG). This article describes legal issues of data collection, parameters and content of hospital data. In principle, the data might additionally be used for epidemiological, quality and public health issues which is, however, not supported by federal law, as of this time (January 2007). Completion of hospital data by unique patient identifiers, extended legal possibilities of scientific use of the data and the combination of hospital data from the DRG system with the data collected by the federal statistical office of Germany are proposed.