The All Patient Refined Diagnosis Related Group

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) The APRDRG 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.