Administrative databases

Asthma admissions, smoking bans and administrative databases.

We read with great interest the recent paper by Sims et al, wherein they identified a clinically and statistically significant reduction in admissions with asthma following the implementation of a workplace smoking ban in the UK, independent of prevailing temporal trends and other measureable confounding factors. We welcome this important addition to the evidence base in this area, and endorse ...

Accuracy of administrative databases in identifying patients with hypertension

BACKGROUND Traditionally, the determination of the occurrence of hypertension in patients has relied on costly and time-consuming survey methods that do not allow patients to be followed over time. OBJECTIVES To determine the accuracy of using administrative claims data to identify rates of hypertension in a large population living in a single-payer health care system. METHODS Various defin...

Identifying Primary Spontaneous Pneumothorax from Administrative Databases: A Validation Study

Introduction. Primary spontaneous pneumothorax (PSP) is a disorder commonly encountered in healthy young individuals. There is no differentiation between PSP and secondary pneumothorax (SP) in the current version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). This complicates the conduct of epidemiological studies on the subject. Objective. To validate the accuracy of an algorithm th...

Administrative databases: are they useful for clinical analyses?

To the Editor:—We are pleased that Rosero et al. pursued a study of the epidemiology of malignant hyperthermia (MH). We agree with Rosero et al. that reporting to the North American Malignant Hyperthermia Registry may underestimate MH mortality. From the Malignant Hyperthermia Association of the United States Hotline and the American Society of Anesthesiologists Closed Claims Project database w...

Discrepancies in administrative databases: implications for practice and research.