Discrepancies in clinical coding after inter-hospital transfer between rural and urban hospitals in Aotearoa New Zealand

Find here for HTRHN Rural Research Scholarship recipient Anna Donaldson’s research.

Higher amenable mortality and lower rates of healthcare utilisation have recently been identified for Aotearoa New Zealand’s (NZ’s) rural and rural Māori populations. These findings rely upon clinical information coded within routinely collected administrative datasets. Anecdotally, clinical coding is often performed by clinicians or reception staff without formal coding training in many NZ rural hospitals. The agreement of clinical coding between NZ rural and urban hospitals is unknown, and data from comparable international health systems is scarce, dated, or inconclusive. This retrospective observational study examined whether discrepancies existed between the clinical diagnosis codes assigned in the National Minimum Dataset (NMDS) for patients who underwent an inter-hospital transfer from a rural to an urban hospital.

https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/esploro/outputs/conferencePaper/Discrepancies-in-clinical-coding-after-inter-hospital/9926520820601891