Evaluating Sources of Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury Surveillance Data in Colorado

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the sources reporting hospitalized spinal cord injury cases to the statewide, population-based surveillance system in Colorado for the year 1994. Three reporting sources were evaluated: clinical contact persons, medical records departments, and a centralized statewide hospital discharge database. Two evaluation strategies were utilized; these include both measures of accuracy and estimates of missed cases. For the latter, capture-recapture techniques were used to estimate the number of hospitalized spinal cord injury cases missed by all three reporting sources. The clinical contact persons reported 84 confirmed cases, missed 80 confirmed cases, and reported 10 cases that were later determined not to have spinal cord injuries, resulting in a sensitivity of 0.51. Medical records departments and the discharge database reported 143 and 147 cases, respectively, missed 21 and 17 confirmed cases, and reported 118 and 69 cases that were later determined not to be cases of hospitalized injuries of the spinal cord, resulting in sensitivities of 0.87 and 0.90. Capture-recapture results indicate all three sources combined missed an estimated 1-5 cases, yielding a total annual incidence rate for hospitalized spinal cord injury ranging from 45.1 to 46.3 per million population.

Baseline Prevalence of Heart Diseases, Hypertension, Diabetes, and Obesity in Persons with Acute Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury: Potential Threats in the Recovery Trajectory

“…Nonetheless, a population-based study in Colorado confirmed 87% and 90% sensitivity for TSCI codes. 43 Third, data did not include information on behavioral, clinical, and psychosocial risk factors that could determine the risk associated with the comorbid conditions of interest. Fourth, it is possible that there may be residual confounders, which we have not accounted for in our study.…”

Validity of administrative data for characterizing traumatic brain injury-related hospitalizations

“…closed head injury not further specified) rather than a distinct injury code. Future research should investigate the discrepancies between the two databases to determine whether the mild TBI cases were missed or are false positives as well as why there are large discrepancies by age and gender [12]. Among the TBI cases identified by the MHD data set, there was good concordance between the MHD and the medical records data regarding the presence of anatomic injuries, specifically skull fractures and intra-cranial lesions.…”

Prevalence of Spinal Cord Injury in Iran: A 3-Source Capture-Recapture Study

“…Moreover, capture-recapture studies are employed in assessments of the completeness of cancer [18] and SCI registries [19]. This study was designed to assess the prevalence of SCI in Iran, using a 3-source capture-recapture method [20,21]. …”