An analysis of Hospital Discharge Index as a trauma data base.

STUDY OBJECTIVE To document the validity of a Hospital Discharge Index (HDI) as a data base on injured patients. DESIGN Patient information in trauma registries was compared with information in HDI. POPULATION Injured patients admitted to trauma centers. METHODS Patients in HDI were crossmatched with individuals in one or two trauma registries using deterministic matching techniques. Agreement regarding the presence and severity of injury was assessed. RESULTS A comprehensive trauma registry from a level I trauma center and HDI agreed on the presence of an injury in each of 6 body regions over a range of kappa values from 0.17 to 0.71. The severity of injury score assigned by the two data bases demonstrated agreement over a range of intraclass correlation values from 0.12 to 0.82. CONCLUSION HDI provides adequate information concerning injury for the majority of hospitalized patients, but was primarily limited by incomplete information. Efforts to improve HDI should focus on guidelines for data abstraction.