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

Bug Fix For DRGFilt

When validating some of our other software, we discovered a long-standing bug in our DRGFilt product which supports ICD10 codes, both the Linux and Windows implementations. This bug is in versions v33, v34 and v34a, v35 and v35a, v36 and v37.

The patched versions are as follows:

• v33a
• v34b
• v35b
• v36a
• v37a

The bug does not affect DRG assignment; it only affects reporting of the DRG weight. Specifically, unpatched executables  report the DRG weight as 10 times greater than it is. Thus 1.2345 was reported as 12.3450.

The good news is that if you are using the weights for their usual purpose, predicting relative resource consumption, you code worked because all the weights were increased by the same factor.

The bad news is that the weights were wrong.

Here are the steps we have taken to correct this issue:

1. We have patched the sources and built new DRGFilt executables: v33a, v34b, v35a, v36a and v37a.
2. We have sent updated versions to any and all clients who purchased the buggy products.
3. We have updated our on-line store with the new executables.
4. We have posted this message on our Tech Blog
5. We are updating our QA process to make sure that we do not have weight reporting problems ever again.

V37 Release

Earlier today, we released versions of our products which support v37 of the US federal grouping algorithm, which version went into service on October 1st, 2019.

What's new with this year's release?

• Our 64 Bit Linux PHP, Perl and C objects are now created on a new platform, a cloud server.
  
• Our 32 Bit Linux products are one step closer to being retired: we are running out of platforms on which to build them. Please leave a comment if you are still using 32 bit executables.
  
• On a Windows 7 computer, our VB DLL is triggering warnings from Norton when we install it on a computer which runs Norton. These warnings can be safely ignored.
  
• We are planning on putting previous versions of our DRG Manual on-line for reference, attached to entries in this blog.

V37 Manual

The link to our v37 technical documentation is here: [link]