This package is for calculating comorbidities using administrative ICD-9 and ICD-10 codes. Methods to categorize codes into sensible disease categories have been developed and published by numerous authors. Two of the most widely used such methods are the Deyo/Quan adaptation of Charlson index and the Elixhauser index. This package has functions to categorize comorbidites into four Charlson-index alternatives, two Elixhauser index alternatives, and the AHRQ comorbidity index (an update to the original Elixhauser method, currently only available for ICD-9).
In this remake of the comorbidity package the main comorbidity calculator function is the cmrbdt.calc() function. You should try to use this instead of the deprecated deyo(), elixhauser(), and ahrq() functions. The function is more flexible and allows a more unified approach to calculating comorbidities. You can provide the function any of the available cmrbdt.finder* functions or write your own finder using as long as you comply to the same API.
The value returned consists of a vector + one or two data frames. The
vector is the total comorbidity count, or in the case of the Charlson score, the total Charlson score.
Each row in the data frame is devoted to a particular patient according to
the corresponding ID-codes provided to the function. The data frame codes a
FALSE if the patient does not have that diagnosis and TRUE if the patient does have
that diagnosis.
This package is a work upon Paul Gerrards original comorbidities package.