Thursday, November 19, 2009

Demo Version?

QUESTION

I spoke to you on the phone a week or so ago re: your Excel product. We are very interested in purchasing the product, but I was wondering if we could get a demo or an older version to test to see if it meets our needs?


ANSWER

Certainly. We do not have a demo version per se; instead we offer very old versions of our software as a way to try before you buy.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Where Is DRG Algorithm?

QUESTION

On your page at http://www.drggroupers.com/drgs.html you mention that the CMS DRG grouping algorithm is public.  I assume the same is true for the APC grouping algorithm.  How can one find or purchase a description of the algorithm (human readable)?
ANSWER

The CMS DRG grouping algorithm is available from 3M. We don't deal with APC DRGs, so we cannot help you there.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Grouping Data in Oracle

QUESTION

I am interested in running a DRG grouper against large (over a million records) data sets.  My Oracle data warehouse sits on a Solaris box, but I also have windows and linux servers if needed.

I simply want to assign DRGs to my data set. So, I'm interested in information on how to do this and what product would be right. It'd also like to get something in house to to ensure that we can actually use it.


ANSWER

If you are not a programmer, then the way to do this would be with DRGFilt:
  1. Export your data as fixed-width text
  2. Create a DRGFilt control file to match your export
  3. Run your text file through DRGFilt
  4. Import the DRGFilt output
DRGFilt outputs all the input data, plus the DRG (and MDC and whatever else you configured), so you can import the DRGFilt and do whatever you like with it.

If you are a programmer, you can get an embeddable DRG Assignment product and call it from a program. Supported environments are Windows or most Unixoid systems. Supported runtime environments are Perl, Visual BASIC, PHP and C. A typical program will do the following:
  1. Select rows out of your database
  2. Process each row one at a time
  3. Extract the DAE inputs from the row
  4. Call the DAE
  5. Parse out the DAE outputs from the call
  6. Either update the original row or create a new row
Finally, if you do not want to do the work yourself, or do not want to deal with the version question (ie, which version DRGs do I use for this given record?) you can use our DRG Assignment Service (DAS) to do the work. In that case, the steps are these:
  1. Extract your data, without PHI
  2. Send us the extract, along with your preferences for the returned data set
  3. Usually in one, but sometimes in up to three business days, you get the data
  4. Import or process the data set returned by us