NOW AVAILABLE: V12.1 ACG System Software

Version 12.1 of The Johns Hopkins ACG® System software is now available! Version 12.1 offers valuable enhancements, continuing to improve this toolkit for managing population health. Some of the most notable updates include:

Adoption of SNOMED CT

The Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) is an international standard for health terminology maintained by SNOMED International and is one of the cornerstones of the United States Core Data for Interoperability Standards (USCDI). The ACG codeset for SNOMED CT recognizes almost 328,000 diagnoses and clinical findings codes. Importantly, SNOMED CT can provide another source of relevant clinical information about emerging health issues. And having access to more data sources only improves the ability of the ACG System to do what it does best: harnessing population health insights from structured clinical data.

Easier access to and refinements to Emergency Visits and Newly Diagnosed constructs

Version 12.1 allows easier access to and refinements to emergency visits and newly diagnosed constructs.  All emergency department visits are classified to one of 11 categories and details for each visit are provided in the ED Visits export file.  Version 12.1 summarizes this detail at the patient level and adds several new counts for each Emergency Department Visit Class to the Patients and ACG Results file.

Functionality supporting population health analyses in the time of COVID-19

Increased functionality is now available in the time of COVID-19.  Initially made available through custom mapping file as part of the 2020 second quarter mapping update, this new EDC supports the reporting and tracking of this condition.  Like other EDCs, INF10 has many applications, and may be used to describe the prevalence of COVID-19 within a single population; compare prevalence of COVID-19 between two or more populations or sub-groups; and, support disease management and case management processes by identifying individual patients with COVID-19 and displaying their patient condition profile.

Other enhancements of version 12.1 include:

• Virtual visits added to outpatient visit count (following CMS guidance)  
• Refinements to MME calculation reflecting recent coding additions as well as providing better differentiation between opioid abuse from those in active treatment
• Statistical significance testing added to distribution reports
• Technical & documentation refinements intended to provide greater transparency and simplify processing options
• Updates to CMS and HHS HCC models

—————

Resources for current ACG System Users (requires authentication):

• V12.1 Release Notes
• System Documentation

For updates on this and other Johns Hopkins Population Health Analytics information, sign up to receive our emails.