ICD10 Support

Monday, October 19th, 2015

DRGGroupers.net is pleased to announce the availability of the support for the ICD10-based DRGs, starting with the version released October 1st, 2015, version 33, which we are calling "v33."

Our ICD9-based products had version numbers which started with "f" for Federal. Our ICD10 experimental versions starting with "x" for "experimental." Now that the ICD10 versions are official our versions start with "v" for "version."

We had to rebuild our development process in order to produce the ICD10 version which is why the release date for v33 was later than we would like. However, now that we have a new and streamlined process, we expect future release dates to be much closed to October 1st.

Since we have to revisit our entire product line as part of the development process, we have stripped down our catalog as well.

To address complaints our previous web presence, we are revamping our web site.

Our ICD9-based products are still available but will not be added to the on-line store at launch. Until our on-line store is updated with our old inventory, our ICD9-based products can be ordered via email to our sales staff


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Are all the function names and file names the same?

Almost. We needed to make some changes so that our ICD9-based implementations can co-exist with our ICD10-based implementations. The biggest change is that our DAE is no longer able to handle more than one version. Future implementations may restore this but for v33 (the first version supporting ICD10), all our products will only handle one version.

In order to keep things straight, we are putting the version in the names of products now; for example:
  • current version of DRGFilt is called drgfiltv33
  • the VB-callable DLL is called vbdrgv33.dll
  • the C-callable DLL is called cdrgv33.dll
Inside the DLLs the main function is now mhdrg1() instead of mhdrg() to keep things straight. Note that mhdrg1() takes two more arguments than its predecessor: the POA indicator and the exempt flag.

Note that the control file for DRGFilt is now radically different; it is now a .INI variant.

See the tech blog for details.

Does the ICD10-based Version Work the Same?

Unlike our ICD9-based releases, the v33 release includes only v33; the v33 products will not handle any other version.

Otherwise we have tried to make the ICD10 code base as close the ICD9 APIs as possible.
In general the only difference in the APIs is that the new calls have two new arguments: the POA indicator (Y/N are there POA flags) and the exempt flag (the HAC exempt status of this patient encounter).

Is there a validation data set for v33?

Yes; CMS released a test data set for this version as they usually do and we reformatted it as a CSV so we could more easily validate our products.

Is the DRGFilt Control File format exactly the same?

No, we switched from our proprietary format to a .INI format.