Expected F29 Release: still 10/12/11

Development has turned over the ICD9 F29 DAE to us for validation, a process we expect to complete in time for a release tomorrow.

The ICD10-prototype-for-F28, which we call X28, will be out of development soon.

Version 29 of ICD10 won't be released until January, 2012, so development won't be done with X29 until the end of January, 2012, at the earliest.

Expected F29 Release: 10/12/11?

When we predicted that we would do a release on 10/10/11, we forgot that 10/10/11 is a holiday hereabouts and that we are closed for business. We will need at least a day to get ready after we get back to work, so we are looking at 10/12/11 at the earliest now.

Web Site Overhaul for F29

As part of our annual release this year, we are overhauling our web site.

We expect to release the new web site when we release the new version. We still expect to do the release sometime on October 10th, 2011.

We hope that the streamlining will make the site more useful to our customers. Let us know if it does not.

Expected F29 Release: 10/10/11

We were not able to get our release out yesterday; we currently expect to do the release on Monday, October 10th.

Codes Used in DRG Assignment, Continued

QUESTION

This is a follow-up to an earlier question.

When I use this.......
---------------------------------------------
$retval = mhdrgc::mhdrg(
         #'f26p',                        # which DRG version you want
         'f28',                        # which DRG version you want
         '/home/programmer/grouper',        # path to masks files
         '1',                        # discharge status (home)
        '72',                        # patient age on admission
        '2',                        # patient sex (1=male, 2=female)
        # ICD DX codes
         '3313    3312    Y49320  Y5990   N7812   Y3051   Y73300  Y3004   Y3320   Y71598  Y412    ',
        # ICD procedure codes
        '0331            ',
        '8',                        # length of each ICD DX code
        '7',                       # length of each ICD procedure code
     );
------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm putting in 11 DX codes and 1 procedure code.

What I get back is this...
---------------------------------------------
0^1^57^28^0.9350^0.00^ ^DEGENERATIVE NERVOUS SYSTEM DISORDERS W/O MCC                         ^1^0


The blog states ...
"The strings are positional: 1001 means that the first code was used, codes two and three were not but code four was. "

Shouldn't the output be more like 
0^1^57^28^0.9350^0.00^ ^DEGENERATIVE NERVOUS SYSTEM DISORDERS W/O MCC                         ^10000000000^0

That is, 3313 was used, but the other ten weren't?

ANSWER

You are referring to the bitstrings of which diagnoses or procedures that were used in the DRG assignment. For the DRGFilt product, these are sflg and dflg keywords.

You are correct, there is a bug in the interface routine. What we see at the lowest level, when we run your example through our testbed, is this:

Diagnosis flags=(100000000000000000000000000000)
Procedure flags=(000000000000000)

So somewhere between the DAE and the Perl interface,the output is being stripped of trailing zeroes, which is not what we want in this case.

We have opened an internal bug and expect to have this fixed in the upcoming release.

Expected F29 Release: 10/06/11

Due to popular demand, this year we are publishing an expected release date for a version.

We expect to release support for version 28 of the US Federal DRG assignment algorithm, active as of October 1st 2011, on October 6th, 2011.

If you have pre-ordered from us, we expect you to have your software by close of business on October 6th, 2011.

We expect to publish an updated manual at the same time.

ICD10 Readiness

QUESTION

As a business partner, we are contacting you to establish what your
current ICD-10 readiness posture is and if your organization has a
comprehensive action plan designed to assure that your systems and data
will be able to accurately transact both ICD-9 and ICD-10 codes.

ANSWER

We are well on our way to full ICD10 support; we expect to maintain backward compatibility for ICD9. For details, see the "ICD10-Based DRG Prototype" link at the top of this page.