Which metric is described as a severity-adjusted measure of the patient mix's resource intensity?

• A. CMI
• B. ROM
• C. DRG
• D. MCC

Answer: (A)

The key idea here is a single number that captures how resource-heavy a hospital’s patient mix is, after accounting for how sick the patients are. The Case Mix Index does exactly that: it’s the average DRG weight across all discharges. Each DRG weight represents the relative resources typically needed for that group of cases, so when you average them across a hospital’s patients, the CMI goes up if the mix includes more severe or resource-intensive cases. That makes it a direct severity-adjusted measure of the patient mix’s resource intensity.

Risk of Mortality focuses on the chance a patient might die, which is a severity outcome rather than a measure of how much resource the patient mix consumes. DRG is the grouping framework used to categorize cases for payment and statistics, not a single index of resource intensity. Major Complication or Comorbidity flags additional severity within DRGs but isn’t the overall resource-use metric for the whole patient mix. So the description points to the Case Mix Index.