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DRG Assignment Services

We offer DRG Assignment Services (DAS) for clients who have inpatient stay records to which they want DRGs assigned. Unlike our software offerings, there is no software to buy and install, no app to run and no programming tools to integrate with your environment. You send us the data set and we run it through our environment and send you back the results.

In order to assign DRGs, we need at least the following data elements (although we can easily ignore other data elements if extra data elements are present)

1. Patient age (can be calculated from birthdate and either discharge date or admission date)
2. Patient sex
3. Discharge disposition (aka discharge status)
4. List of diagnoses, up to 25, encoded as ICD10
5. Corresponding Present on Admission (POA) flags for each Dx
6. List of procedures, aka surgeries, up to 25 encoded as ICD10

In order to return the results, we require a record ID or encounter ID. We can count the records and use the record count at the record ID if necessary.

We can return any and all of the following data elements:

1. Diagnosis Related Group (DRG)
2. Major Diagnostic Category (MDC)
3. Grouper Return Code (GRC)
4. DRG weight for this DRG
5. DRG Geometric Mean LOS for this DRG
6. Description for this DRG
7. DRG Type for this DRG (Medical or Procedural)
8. List of DX codes which were used in the assignment
9. List of Procedure codes which were used in the assignment
10. Which DRG version was used (in case the data set spans DRG versions)

We are seasoned medical data weenies, so we can handle just about any reasonable input format and just about any processing requirement, from automatically choosing the DRG version based on discharge date to forcing the DRG version for the data set, to translating values for sex and values for discharge status.

Our in-house environment supports all published DRG versions, both ICD9cm-based and ICD10-based, from HCFA version 2 up through whatever the current CMS version might be.