About Us

Health Systems Consultants was founded in 1990 to bring to market software developed at Yale University in the late 1980s.

The model underlying the RDRG® system was developed by the Yale research team that had earlier created the original concept of Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs). In response to concerns that the original DRGs did not adequately adjust for the severity of a patient’s illness, the US Health Care Financing Administration (now the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services or CMS) commissioned the same research team to create a “refined” DRG model. The three-year project used two large all-patient state databases and then validated the model by tests with Medicare data.

Karen Schneider, now President of Health Systems Consultants, was the Project Director. As a member of the Health Systems Management Group at Yale, she not only served as the Project Director for studies involving DRG cost-modeling and control systems but also directed a study that produced an early version of the ambulatory patient groups (Ambulatory Visit Groups) and coordinated a multidisplinary team to carry out a federal research project in long-term care reimbursement.  Karen was involved as well in efforts to introduce DRGs into foreign countries. Today, in addition to HSC, she is research faculty member at the Yale School of Medicine.

Since its inception in 1990, hundreds of healthcare organizations – hospitals and hospital systems, healthcare insurers, hospital associations, and research institutions – in the USA and several other countries have used RDRG as an important analytic tool. RDRG has also been licensed by consulting and data processing organizations that perform database analysis for thousands of individual hospitals.

Each year we update the RDRG system for new CMS DRG classifications and new or changed diagnosis and procedure codes, working with members of the original Yale team, and a new annual Version is created to match the coding appropriate for that year.

In addition, we present seminars on the methodology and applications of RDRG, provide analysis and reports, and publish an installation manual and a 700-page definitions manual that make the RDRG logic transparent and the software easy to use. We pride ourselves on responsive customer service. Assistance is only a phone call away!