Sunday, April 4, 2010

Length of Stay ALOS vs GLOS

QUESTION

I have your v27 DRG grouper software and it appears that it returns the
Geometric mean Length of Stay (GLOS) for each DRG. Is there any way to get
the Arithmetic mean Length of Stay (ALOS)?

I am using DLL calls from your software's "mhinfo" function to get the
GLOS. Please let me know. Thank you.

ANSWER

I have done some digging and discovered that, as you confirmed, the ALOS is not exposed through this API. You would have to match up the DRG with its ALOS explicitly in your code.

In order to help you with that, please find attached the spreadsheet published by CMS with this information in it. [Note: file was attached to support email, but is not reachable from this blog posting.]