Highlights
- •Physicians’ diagnoses only reported 405 (40%) of the 1011 injury-related hospitalizations.
- •The proportions of under-reporting, lack of cause specificity, and misclassification errors were 50.5%, 7.9% and 1.5%, respectively.
- •The proportion of diagnostic errors remained relatively similar across patient sex, intent of injury, and cause of injury subgroups, but varied substantially across patient age groups.
Abstract
Objective
To assess the accuracy of injury-related hospitalization diagnoses by physicians in
China.
Methods
62,269 hospitalizations between 2014 and 2016 at a large hospital in Changsha, China
were assessed. We considered three types of diagnostic errors: under-reporting, lack
of cause specificity, and misclassification across injury causes. Diagnosis and coding
of diseases were ascertained by professional coders based on the tenth International
Classification of Disease (ICD-10). Chi square tests examined the proportion difference
across subgroups of patient demographics, injury intent, and injury cause.
Results
The 62,269 records included 1011 injury-induced hospitalizations, but physicians’
diagnoses only reported 405 (40%) of the 1011 hospitalizations as injury-related.
The proportions of under-reporting, lack of cause specificity, and misclassification
errors, respectively, were 50.5%, 7.9% and 1.5%. The proportion of diagnostic errors
was relatively similar across patient sex, intent of injury, and cause of injury subgroups,
but varied substantially across patient age groups.
Conclusion
Physicians’ diagnoses frequently omitted injury-induced hospitalizations. Such errors
will impact injury research and policy-making when they are undetected and uncorrected.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: July 02, 2020
Accepted:
July 2,
2020
Identification
Copyright
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
