I10 Progress Report #1

Many of you have enquired about the status of our support for the upcoming grouper release. This post is intended to answer those questions.

This coming October 1st we are due to release v33, which will be the first version which is only ICD10 (i10). Starting with v33, we will no longer provide ICD9-based (i9-based) grouping support, so v33 is our first non-experimental release which is i10-based.

Up to now, our versions have all been i9-based except for the experimental i10-based products. We designated the experimental versions with an 'x' instead of a 'v', so v31 was the i9-based grouper and x31 was the i10-based grouper.

Last year's grouper was the last grouper with both, so v32 is the last i9-based grouper and x32 is the last time that i10-based grouping is considered 'experimental.'

On top of the very large shift from i9-based to i10-based grouping, our in-house grouper guru retired, which forced us to revamp our development process.

This is our plan to migrate us from the i9-based to i10-based development:

1. Technology turn over from departing guru to new team
2. Re-create x31 with the new process and new team
3. Create x32 with the new process and new team
4. Create v33 with the new process and new team

We are happy to report the step (1) was completed in early June and that step (2) was completed yesterday.

We expect to complete step (3) today and have an x32 DRGFilt available for evaluation by first thing Monday morning.

Currently, we feel that we are on track to be ready to provide our DRG Assignment Service for v33 on October 1st.

We are currently reviewing our product line to see which products we want to port from i9 to i10. As soon as we can we will put up an on-line survey to allow our customers to weigh in on which products to keep and which to leave behind.

ICD10 Support in 2015

2015 should be a banner year for DRG Groupers; we are taking advantage of the impending shift to ICD10 to knock some items off of our to-do list:

• We are going to change our web site to improve the on-line shopping experience.
  
• We changed our URL to DRGGroupers.net to go with our web site overhaul.
  
  
• We are going to try to streamline our upload and download pathways for our DRG Assignment Service (DAS).
  
• We are going to review our product definitions to make sure that we are offering what people want to buy.
  
• We are trying out a streamlined development process by creating an ICD10 version of v32 DRGs--and we are looking for beta testers.

This is an ambitious slate to get done by the end of the year, but so far we are on track and appreciate your patience with any issues that arise.

New URL: DRGGroupers.net

It is official: we have changed over to DRGGroupers.net as our Internet domain name. This is part of our overhaul for 2015 as we clean house and tidy up as we prepare to support ICD10 with version 33 this coming autumn.

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.)