I10 Product Catalog

We are overhauling our operations as part of the switch from ICD9cm to ICD10 and one of the areas we are overhauling is our product catalogue.

Many of our products are holdovers from when our customers were mostly information system developers who wanted software development tools, such as shared objects and hash table look-ups.

In recent years we find that fewer and fewer of our customers are programmers and more and more of our customers are analysts or end-users.

We plan to continue to support developers, but on a custom and case-by-case basis: there is no longer any need to clutter our catalogue with estoteric items.

Our ICD9cm catalogue had 30 items and we wanted to get down to 10 items. We think that we have done it; here is our proposed catalogue so we can get your feedback before we make the final decisions.

Items We Plan to Keep

SKU	Description	Status
AIXFILT	DRGFilt for AIX	y
CDLL	Visual C-callable DLL	y
DASJUMBO	DRG Assignment Jumbo Data set"	y
DASLARGE	DRG Assignment Large Data set"	y
DASMEDIUM	DRG Assignment Medium Data set"	y
LINUXFILT64	64 bit Linux DRGFilt	y
MASKS	DRG Masks	y
VBDLL	VB-callable grouper DLL	y
WINFILT	DRGFilt for 32 bit Windows	y
WMASKS	Win32 DRG Masks	y

 
Items We Plan to Retire

SKU	Description	Status
CICD	ICD9 Name-finding C-callable DLL	n
COBJ32SO	32 bit C-callable shared object	n
DASSMALL	DRG Assignment Small Data set"	n
ICDTAB	ICD9cm short file	n
ICLUP	ICL Run-time Environment Upgrade	n
LINUX32CGIDRG	32 bit Linux CGI DRG Assigner	n
LINUXFILT32	32 bit Linux DRGFilt	n
PERL32SO	32 bit Perl-callable shared object	n
PERL64SO	Perl-callable shared object	n
PHP32SO	32 bit PHP-callable shared object	n
PHP64SO	64 bit PHP-callable shared object	n
SPARCFILT	DRGFilt for Sun SPARC	n
VBICD	ICD9cm Name VB-callable DLL	n
W32CGIDRG	32 bit Windows CGI DRG Assigner	n
WICDTAB	Win32 ICD9cm short file	n
XLDRG	MS-Excel DRG Assigning spreadsheet	n

Items We Are Considering Keeping

SKU	Description	Status
ACCESSDRG03	MS-Access	?
ACCESSDRG07	MS-Access	?
COBJ64SO	64 bit C-callable shared object	?
LINUX64CGIDRG	64 bit Linux CGI DRG Assigner	?

F32: Access-DRG Issue

Friday, April 17, 2015 we received a bug report about Access-DRG crashing. We traced the problem to the call to our VB-Callable DLL. We had failed to propagate an update to our servers. We responded with a patch that day.

Please let us know if you are having trouble with Access-DRG so we can diagnose the problem and send you an update if appropriate.

F32: New Windows Reference Platform

Between F31 and F32, Windows XP ceased to be supported. In order to keep our customer's data safe and to keep our systems up-to-date, we retired all of our XP boxes. Since our previous windows reference platform was a 32-bit Windows XP desktop, we had to retire it as well.

Our new Windows reference platform is a 64-bit Windows 7 environment running on a 64-bit processor.

To ensure backwards compatibility, we have included a 32-bit Windows 7 environment in our testing group.

To the best of our knowledge, there is no issue here but please let us know if we are wrong about that.

F32 New ICD9 Codes

To quote the official CMS site (http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD9ProviderDiagnosticCodes/addendum.html),

There are no new ICD-9-CM code updates effective October 1, 2014.

F32 Support

This year's release has not gone well. It should be ready first thing tomorrow, Thursday, November 13, 2014, which is the latest we have ever released a grouper, and there is a known issue with the release (we are confident that the known issue will not matter to any of our customers, but we feel the need to document it none the less.)

First, we had to dust off our ICD9 technology which we had expected to have retired by now. Many aspects of this technology are different and out of date and resurrecting the development environment was more challenging than we had expected.

Then our lead engineer ended up in the hospital for a week just before our big release push, which has us scrambling do to the release. This caused the initial delay.

Finally, after the programming was done, our QA testing turned up the following issue: while our DRG Assignment Engine (DAE) returns the correct DRG in all test cases, sometimes it does not return the expected error code.

Specifically, our DAE does not distinguish shares of Hospital Acquired Condition (HAC) errors; it returns 9 when sometimes the CMS grouper returns 9, 11 or 15. So if you need to know more precisely how the HAC rules were violated, we currently cannot help you.

(If we discover from customer feedback that we are wrong and these distinctions matter, we will do a release to replicate the CMS error handling.)