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Introduction. Methods of financing health care services constantly undergo changes. These changes involve both the allocated financial resources and average prices received for person-day of treating patients in hospital departments of various specialties. Thus, a constant monitoring of financing levels and service pricing in particular types of health care services is indispensable, since these issues are directly associated with the development or stagnation observed in particular branches of medicine. Aim. This paper aimed at verifying the hypothesis that the pricing of person-day in the field of inpatient therapeutic rehabilitation, especially involving children, is under priced in relation to an average value of a person-day received in specialties providing non-invasive hospital treatment, and comparable as regards the costs of services. Materials and methods. An analysis and comparison of costs and incomes for medical units providing health care services in selected areas of inpatient therapeutic rehabilitation for children and non-invasive hospital medical treatment have been attempted. This analysis has been carried out on the basis of data provided by the regional branches of the National Health Fund (NFZ). Generally available information concerning the terms and conditions of contracting services and agreements that NFZ has entered into with service providers has been also used. Results and discussion. A comparison of the conditions for providing services that service providers should meet in order to obtain financing within the framework of NFZ, shows that personnel costs of a department of pulmonary rehabilitation and department of general rehabilitation are lower by approximately 15% than personnel costs of a department of pediatrics, and 9% lower than for a department of pediatric neurology. However, an average pricing of person-day received by rehabilitation departments is about 3-fold lower than that received by departments of pediatrics and pediatric neurology. Departments providing non-invasive medical treatment admit a large variety of patients. This diversification of patients only in part coincides with patients admitted to rehabilitation departments. Thus, additionally average pricings of person-day at departments providing non-invasive medical treatment and departments of general rehabilitation with respect to selected diagnosis related groups of patients who manifest diseases treated in both types of departments, have been compared. The obtained results have confirmed gross under financing of inpatient rehabilitative services. Conclusions. Inpatient rehabilitative services offered for children are particularly undervalued. In this instance, service providers bear higher costs, resulting from, among other considerations, a larger average number of physiotherapists necessary to conduct rehabilitation, the requirement of assuming the full legal responsibility for children which necessitates additional educational care and 24-hours medical care, not only in the case of neurological rehabilitation, as well as providing nutrition adequate for children's ages, including five high-quality meals daily. Consequently, it is necessary to increase the pricing of inpatient rehabilitative services provided for children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. The era of computer testing, measurement and decision-making systems began in the second half of the 20th century. Medical application of such systems manifests itself in digital devices for the observation of the patient's condition, X-ray and laboratory diagnostics. In this article the authors concentrate on the decision-making systems, and, in particular, on decision-making self-learning systems which, as the authors suggest, could be applied in medical diagnostics. Creating the model of the self-learning system based on patients' clinical records for the use of rehabilitation-orthopedic diagnostics is the principal aim of this research. Materials and methods. Pathological entities displayed by 850 patients (at the age of 6-20 years, on average 14.6 years) were classified. All the patients underwent treatment for idiopathic scoliosis (IS) in the Department and Clinic of Rehabilitation and in the Provincial Rehabilitation Hospital for Children in Ameryka near Olsztyn, Poland. The diagnostics imaging technique (X-ray, CT, CT-3D) was focused on identifying characteristic entities, discovered by the image algorithm identification and by the analysis of spectrum obtained out of Fourier transformation and Falk transformation. As regards the IS identification, it was appropriate to use diagnostics imaging techniques, as well as anamnesis to analyze the data. Results and discussion. The research resulted in creating the output vector in the form of anticipated treatment effects. The topology of the classification network was designed on the basis of the artificial neural networks recurrent algorithm. Conclusions. The applied classification procedure proves that defining input data and normalizing reply vector allows researchers to build the artificial neural network for the purpose of anticipating treatment effects on the basis of the acquired knowledge. For a competent medical doctor, the self-learning system can function only as an advisory device, which produces a useful information tool by means of accumulated information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]