Thursday, January 5, 2012

Estimated CMI?

Your query to DRGGroupers.com:
My Boss wants an estimated CaseMixIndex  within 24 hours of admission.  I know that we have to default some fields, i.e. discharge status.  He wants me to compare the CMI using the 24 hours of data with the final CMI assigned after discharge.  Is this possible?  Does it even make sense for us to try?  Look forward to your response. 

Our reply:

Technologically, this is not hard. However it is not clear that the results would be meaningful, but that is your boss's call.

To assign a DRG, you need the following data elements:

(a) sex
(b) age
(c) diagnoses
(d) procedures
(e) discharge status

In the first 24 hours of an inpatient encounter, you would know the sex and age of the patient. You could assume that the discharge status will be "home" which will be very wrong sometimes. You could use the notoriously inaccurate admitting diagnosis and whatever procedures were performed immediately for the diagnoses and procedures.

No comments:

Post a Comment