The All Patient Refined Diagnosis Related Group - Text Mining Techniques for Healthcare Provider Quality Determination - page 202

Chapter 6
The All Patient Reined
Diagnosis Related Group
IntroductIon
In this chapter, we will discuss the APRDRG, or all patient refined diagnosis related group. It is another
type of coding system that, unlike the Charlson Index, is proprietary and developed by the 3M Healthcare
Company in 1990.(Anonymous-3M 2008) TheAPRDRG severity grouper is currently used by CMS (The
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid) for severity adjusting all of Medicare's hospital discharges. The 3M
Company is also responsible for maintaining, updating and creating new DRG's for CMS.Therefore,
we cannot know what specific diagnosis codes are used to define the APRDRG severity index. In the
APRDRG, patients are divided into one of four classes for severity of illness, and again divided into
one of four classes for the risk of mortality.
The APRDRG differs from the Charlson Index in that all primary and secondary patient diagnoses are
considered, usually within a specific procedure. Although the assignment of severity is proprietary, the
resulting patient level APRDRG codes are publicly available in the National Inpatient Sample datasets.
We will be using these publicly available results in this chapter. Procedures are also divided into medical
versus surgical, and severity assignments are different for the two categories. Physician panels were used
to define the categories of patient conditions, and the categories are periodically updated to ensure their