Healthcare Resource Groups (HRGs) offer organisations the ability to understand their activity in terms of the types of patients they care for, and the treatments they undertake. They enable the comparison of activity within and between different organisations and provide an opportunity to benchmark treatments and services to support trend analysis over time. HRGs are currently used as a means of determining fair and equitable reimbursement for care services delivered by providers. These consistent 'units of currency' support standardised healthcare commissioning across the service.

The new HRG4 will support Payment by Results by providing a classification framework that represents current clinical practice. In addition, HRG4 will support service planning, costing and commissioning between PCTs and Trusts by providing reliable and consistent presentation of activity data.

The "Episode of Care" form which has been designed in close partnership with Paper IQ has made the very process of capturing activity data for HRG4 very easy. Previously the information would have been captured from the monthly stat forms and from information captured within the maternity booking notes, which was a very time consuming process. Now the information is captured automatically as a data by-product when the Midwife completes the Episode of Care form with a digital pen. The form has been designed to capture all the required activity information in the form of tick boxes which is transferred and saved in a central database where the management team can run reports as and when required. If any new requirements are requested these can be easily added to the form.