Quality of hospital discharge and physician data for type of breast cancersurgery

OBJECTIVE. The quality of coding for breast surgical procedures was examine d by comparing hospital discharge abstracts and physician claims with data abstracted from records of women diagnosed with node-negative breast cancer from April 1, 1991, to December 31, 1991. METHODS. The node-negative breast cancer cohort was linked with a populatio n registry file. Hospital discharge abstracts and physician billing claims were retrieved for matched subjects. Overall agreement between two data set s was defined as the number of cases for which there was a match by specifi c type of procedure out of all eligible cases that were matched with the he alth care utilization file. Specific agreement was assessed by the kappa st atistic, using only those records in the administrative data set that were coded for mastectomy or breast-conserving surgery. RESULTS. Of 735 eligible cases in the node-negative breast cancer cohort, 6 55 (89.1%) were linked to a health care utilization file. Overall agreement between surgeon billing claims and charts was 95.4% (CI = 93.5, 96.9) for most definitive procedure. Agreement for breast surgery type was 98.1% (kap pa = 0.96; CI = 0.87,1.0) for cases coded as breast-conserving surgery or m astectomy. When hospital discharge and chart data were compared, overall ag reement was 86.2% (CI = 83.4, 88.8), whereas agreement for breast surgery t ype was 93.2% (kappa = 0.86; CI = 0.77, 0.94). CONCLUSION. Overall, definitive surgical procedure in the two administrativ e databases accurately reflected information recorded in patients' charts. Physician claims appeared to provide more accurate information than did hos pital discharge data.