V37b Released (CMS 37.1 R1)

The group responsible for defining the DRGs each year are the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).  They are a part of the US federal government.

Normally, each version DRGs is released on October 1st, the start of their fiscal year. So it was with version 37 on October 1st, 2019. A little while later we followed suit with our implementation of their algorithm.

On April 1st, 2020, CMS 37.1 release 1 (37.1 R1 in their terms) was released in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a link to an AHA article on the subject.

This update also includes provision to support diagnosis of vaping. You can find a CMS bulletin about the support here.

Since this release supercedes v37 and v37a, we are replacing our v37 offerings with their v37b counterparts. For the most part, you can tell the difference by looking at the software's internal version number, which should be reported as "v37b".

However, in order to minimize the pain of upgrading, all the software still expects "v37" as the input and output version numbers and the masks file has the same name. You can tell the difference between the mask files, despite their names, by their md5sum values:

0056716453280971ae09e915fb2c738a  drgmasks.v37 <---------v37b
dec337b97acaa2c50fb6738a6727b332  drgmasks.v37.0 <-------v37 & v37a

Any customer who purchased a V37 product will be offered a free upgrade.

Any customer who purchases a V37 product going forward will be v37b.

You can confirm that you are running v37b by using either of the two new diagnosis codes and seeing that they are properly handled:

Code	Description	CC	MDC	DRGs
U07.0	Vaping-related disorder	N	04	205, 206
U07.1	COVID-19	MCC	04	177, 178, 179
			15	791, 793
			25	974, 975, 976