Know About CCS Or Clinical Classifications Software

Clinical Classifications Software (CCS) is another commonly used term in health care sector. CCS collapses diagnosis and procedure codes from the ICD-9 Codes, which contains more than 14,000 diagnosis codes and 3,900 procedure codes.

This can be employed in many types of projects analyzing data on diagnoses and procedures. CCS can be used to identify populations for disease- or procedure-specific studies or to develop statistical reports providing information about relatively specific conditions.

Developed at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Clinical Classifications Software (CCS) makes

CCS classification systems:
1.    Single-level
2.    Multi-level
Single-level :  Single-level CCS is most useful for ranking of diagnoses and procedures and for direct integration into risk adjustment and other software. This Single-level CCS lassifies all diagnoses and procedures into unique groups, has a total of 285 mutually exclusive categories.
Multi-level: Multi-level CCS is most useful when evaluating larger aggregations of conditions and procedures or exploring them in greater detail. The multi-level CCS expands the single-level CCS into a hierarchical system. The multi-level CCS groups single-level CCS categories into broader body systems or condition categories. It also splits single-level CCS categories to provide more detail. The multi-level system has four levels for diagnoses and three levels for procedures, which provide the opportunity to examine general groupings or to assess very specific conditions and procedures.

Use of CCS:

CCS can be used with all clinical data that are coded using ICD-9-CM codes.
•    Managed care plans utilize CCS to rank hospitalizations by type of condition. Managed care plan used CCS to examine numbers of cases, length of stay, and total costs, to better understand which conditions and procedures were associated with the highest resource use.
•    Insurers use CCS to develop clinically-based utilization profiles.
•    Researchers use CCS to explore the types of conditions and procedures that are most frequent in their study populations or to compare alternative treatments for similar conditions.
•    Researchers also use CCS in risk adjustment models and as a way to predict future health resource utilization.

it easier to quickly understand patterns of diagnoses and procedures so that health plans, policy makers, and researchers can analyze costs, utilization, and outcomes associated with particular illnesses and procedures.