How well do discharge diagnoses identify hospitalised patients with community-acquired infections?--a validation study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Credible measures of disease incidence, trends and mortality can be obtained through surveillance using manual chart review, but this is both time-consuming and expensive. ICD-10 discharge diagnoses are used as surrogate markers of infection, but knowledge on the validity of infections in general is sparse. The aim of the study was to determine how well ICD-10 discharge diagnoses identify patients with community-acquired infections in a medical emergency department (ED), overall and related to sites of infection and patient characteristics.

Methods

We manually reviewed 5977 patients admitted to a medical ED in a one-year period (September 2010-August 2011), to establish if they were hospitalised with community-acquired infection. Using the manual review as gold st

SUBMITTER: Henriksen DP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3963967 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature