[Psychopathological Syndromes According to the AMDP-system As the Foundation for Clinical Case Grouping in Psychiatry]

Objective: Diagnoses-related clinical case grouping for an estimation of resource consumption for psychiatric inpatients analogue to the somatic medicine till now did not lead to sufficient prediction of costs. However, this is required when regarding increasing health costs from the economic perspective.

Method: We investigated whether classical psychopathological syndromes according to the AMDP-System at admission would predict the variation of length of hospital stay. Using linear regressions with forward elimination, we analyzed the predictive value of the AMDP syndromes, and also of global assessment of functioning, illness severity and certain sociodemographic factors for the length of stay.

Results: Together with clinical and sociodemographic factors, we found a variance estimation of 20 %.

Conclusions: Our pilot study does not imply AMDP syndromes to be suitable for a case grouping to estimate costs. Other analytical approaches using AMDP syndromes may lead to a better prediction, however, its use shall be regarded critically.