F30 Pre-Release

We have received a pre-release of F30 from our development group to accommodate a DRG Assignment Service (DAS) client who wanted to try out F30 ahead of its official release on October 1st, 2012.

We put the pre-release F30 through our basic validation process, upgraded our DAS system and have used it successfully.

We are in the process of finishing the internal F30 roll-out.

Barring changes from CMS or bug reports, this will become our official F30 release on October 1st, 2012.

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.

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.

Grouping Data in Oracle

QUESTION

I am interested in running a DRG grouper against large (over a million records) data sets.  My Oracle data warehouse sits on a Solaris box, but I also have windows and linux servers if needed.

I simply want to assign DRGs to my data set.  So, I'm interested in information on how to do this and what product would be right.  It'd also like to get something in house to to ensure that we can actually use it.

ANSWER

If you are not a programmer, then the way to do this would be with DRGFilt:

1. Export your data as fixed-width text
2. Create a DRGFilt control file to match your export
3. Run your text file through DRGFilt
4. Import the DRGFilt output

DRGFilt outputs all the input data, plus the DRG (and MDC and whatever else you configured), so you can import the DRGFilt and do whatever you like with it.

If you are a programmer, you can get an embeddable DRG Assignment product and call it from a program. Supported environments are Windows or most Unixoid systems. Supported runtime environments are Perl, Visual BASIC, PHP and C. A typical program will do the following:

1. Select rows out of your database
2. Process each row one at a time
3. Extract the DAE inputs from the row
4. Call the DAE
5. Parse out the DAE outputs from the call
6. Either update the original row or create a new row

Finally, if you do not want to do the work yourself, or do not want to deal with the version question (ie, which version DRGs do I use for this given record?) you can use our DRG Assignment Service (DAS) to do the work. In that case, the steps are these:

1. Extract your data, without PHI
2. Send us the extract, along with your preferences for the returned data set
3. Usually in one, but sometimes in up to three business days, you get the data
4. Import or process the data set returned by us