Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Disease Costing

QUESTION

I would like to know if the DRG batch Grouping come with already grouped diseases with costing?
If not how do we get disease grouping that we can begin to work with?


ANSWER

The short answer is that our software does not perform any financial calculations. However, the output of our DRG Assignment Engine (DAE) can be used as the input to many such calculations.

As we understand it, "disease costing" is the calculation of what an individual, group or community spends, directly or indirectly, as a result of a given health condition or conditions.

In the US, the DRGs were used as the basis of a prospective payment system for hospitals; each DRG is assigned a weight to represent the expected resource utilization (cost) of a typical inpatient stay for that DRG.

For more information, consult our manual's Reimbursement section.

In our experience, the usual method for disease costing using DRGs is to match either hospital-specific or regional "factors" with DRGs, so multiplying the factor times the DRG weight gives the expected disease cost for an individual case. Multiply again by the number of cases and you have the theoretical disease cost for the population under study:

Disease cost = (Number of cases with this DRG) x ((DRG weight) x (DRG factor))

We do not endorse or recommend any particular set of factors. We generally find such sets of factors to be published by the World Health Organization or local universities engaged specifically in this kind of research.

We are happy to provide support for implementing disease costing on a consulting basis.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Issue Downloading Software

QUESTION
Hello,

I get a 403 forbidden error when trying to download the software I just
purchased, please advise. Details follow:

Forbidden. You don't have permission to access /downloads/DRGGroupers-613596.zip on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request


ANSWER

This was a problem with our web site building configuration. We have resolved this problem, both on the active site and in our development environment. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Why You Should Email Before Uploading Files

Last night there was an unannounced upload to our drop box. We generally ignore unannounced uploads and allow them to be automatically deleted after a few days, on the assumption that it was a mistake or an attack. We happened to have the time to inspect last night's upload and deleted it immediately as it was obviously an attack.

It was named "s.php" but upon inspection with a text editor, far from any web server environment in which it might run, it turned out to be a rather old attack, c99shell.

This is an example of why we require that customers alert us via email before uploading files. It is a shame that we have to have this policy, but we do have to have it.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Dropbox Support?

QUESTION

Do you support Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) for exchanging files?

ANSWER

Not yet; internally we have been trying out Dropbox and really like it, but we need to make sure that it meets our privacy standards first, and then we need to figure out how many of our clients are using it. We are certainly open to using it to exchange files; we should be able to accommodate individual cases as we continue our evaluation, so send us email if this is how you want to send or receive files.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Question About DRG27

QUESTION

Hey there I currently have your v27 software and we recently put this into production for the current year.

My question is if it's backward compatible ?  I need to go back 3  years in my dataset and assign a drg value.  Can I use your software version to do this ? will it look at the service dates and assign a previous version ?  Or, must I buy a previous version or versions and apply based on the year ?

Thanks for your help.


ANSWER

(Before we start, I should point out the current version is F29, not F27; you can see the complete list of versions here:

http://www.drggroupers.com/grouper.html

For the purposes of this answer, I will assume that you knew this already and that you wanted F27.)

In order to assign DRGs for a given version, you need two things:
  1. Logic, which we encode in software
  2. Code attributes, which we encode in masks files
The software is always for a given version; in your case, that is F27. The software is backwardly compatible, provided that you have the masks files for previous vesrions.

So if  you have software for F27 and want to assign DRGs for F24, then all you would need to do is to buy the masks file ($100 from our on-line store at the above link) for F24. In fact, you can buy masks files for any version before F28 and then be able to assign DRGs for that version.

File Upload

Customers often need to send us files as part of our DRG Assignment Service (DAS) and customers sometimes need to send us files as part of getting technical support.

To handle either case, we have added a File Upload page, powered by TransferBigFiles.com. This upload page is available from the navigation bar at the top of any of our web pages from our main site:

http://www.drggroupers.com

You can also reach it directly at

http://www.drggroupers.com/upload.html

Please let us know what you think.