ACCURACY OF SELF-REPORTED HEALTH HISTORIES - A STUDY

Many military health care providers (including most dental providers) depend on self-reported health questionnaires for critical information about their patients' medical history. These questionnaires demand hi gh standards of patient self-awareness and integrity, and their import ance justifies checking their accuracy. The authors checked the accura cy of 155 self-reported health histories by comparing them with histor ies documented in medical records. Although we found some discrepancie s, over 95% of our sample showed reasonable agreement between self-rep orted medical histories and documented medical histories.