Improving Hospital Discharge Data: Lessons From the National Hospital Discharge Survey

Hospital discharge data can be used for monitoring procedures and intensive care related to severe maternal morbidity

“…First, the large variety of participants of diverse skill levels involved in coding leads to heterogeneity in the quality of the medical information [15,18,36,40,42,43]. Second, the most serious cases, which involved the mobilization of the entire medical team, may be overcoded to indicate the seriousness of situation [39,40,44,45]. Finally, the payment system based on severity of diagnosis is a strong incentive to overcoding, that is, it increases remuneration for the hospital [11,43,46,47].…”

“…A similar problem is seen with the use of the ''thesaurus,'' a summary of codes of procedures performed regularly in the department, which facilitates coding but does not describe rare and severe situations correctly [22,42]. Demlo and Campbell [44] and Demlo et al [45] predicted this type of problem at the implementation of the system of health-related administrative databases in the United States in the early 1980s.…”

Female Sex as a Risk Factor for In-Hospital Mortality Among Children Undergoing Cardiac Surgery

“…[25][26][27] In the present study, we attempted to minimize the effect of errors from miscoding by restricting our case selections to hospitals with Ն10 cases/year of pediatric cardiac surgery. In addition, we carefully examined the procedure and diagnosis codes for each patient.…”

Deaths due to Unknown Foodborne Agents

“…Errors in hospital diagnosis coding often result from incomplete descriptions of diagnoses on the face sheet of medical records ( 30 ). Errors in mortality coding are frequently due to inaccurate completion of the cause-of-death section on death certificates ( 31 ).…”