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What can RDRG® Severity Analytics do for you?
The RDRG® Severity System accurately reflects the severity of a patient’s illness by considering secondary diagnoses to determine a Refined DRG.

RDRG® provides far more accurate information about cost of treatment and length of stay than the unrefined DRGs historically used by many healthcare organizations. Even more important, RDRG is a much more accurate tool than today’s newly mandated Medicare severity-adjusted DRGs (CMS MS-DRGs).

Hospital managers use RDRG® to provide data for a wide range of analytical purposes:

• Study case mix severity trends.
• Measure departmental cost trends against severity of case mix.
• Evaluate physician performance.
• Compare hospital performance in multi-hospital systems.
• Compare hospital performance to external benchmarks.
• Plan future facility and staffing needs.
• Develop capital and expense budgets.

Your analyses are the basis for operational management decisions, plans and budgets. A small percentage error can have large consequences. That’s why you need RDRG.

How does RDRG® work?
RDRG® is a software tool that plugs into your enterprise software system and utilizes your existing database.  (click here for a diagram)
Here’s how it works:

• Severity of illness in the RDRG® system is defined in terms of resource use, and so the RDRG® system can predict appropriate hospital resource requirements based on patient data.
• RDRG works from your existing database using the normal patient information entered by your coding department, such as ICD-9-CM diagnoses and procedures, age and gender. This patient data is used to classify patients into 1324 RDRGs.
• Principal diagnosis or primary procedure places a patient into an Adjacent Diagnosis Related Group (ADRG) and secondary diagnoses place a patient into a severity class within an ADRG.
• There are 182 medical Adjacent DRGs with 3 severity classes—minor (0), moderate (1) and major (2)
• There are 183 surgical Adjacent DRGs with 4 severity classes—minor (0), moderate (1), major (2) and catastrophic (3).
• In addition, there are 24 early death groups (death within 2 days of admission for medical patients only), 18 neonate groups (most based on birth weight), and 4 DRGs without severity classes (469, 470, 541 and 542)
• RDRG® groups the patient data into DRGs and into severity classes within DRGs.  The DRGs produced are those of the public domain DRG grouper used historically by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
• RDRG® produces two major output fields – the CMS public domain DRG and the severity-adjusted RDRG. These parameters can then be used by your existing analytical applications and processes.

Versions available:

• RDRG® software versions are available for 1989 – 2008 DRGs.
• The current version, RDRG® V22.0 issued November 30, 2008, is updated for this year’s V26.0 CMS additions and adjustments to new ICD-9-CM diagnosis and procedure codes and to new CMS complications and comorbidities (CC) lists.
• New this year, V22.0 contains built-in tables that map current codes to prior year codes, enabling a user to apply the current version to multiple years’ data for year-to-year trend analysis. This feature eliminates the need to have a version for each year of your analysis.

Clients tell us the RDRG® software is quick and easy to install, use, and interface.  Written in C, our software works on most any computer system, including PC’s (MS-DOS and Windows), Vax machines and Unix systems.