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Administrative data identified pediatric CAP population
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Using administrative data to study community-acquired pneumonia in children provides numerous strategies to identify the population, according to study findings published in JAMA Pediatrics.
“Unrestricted application of the pneumonia-related codes does not accurately identify [community-acquired pneumonia] in children, although several coding strategies offer improvements in specificity while also retaining good sensitivity,” researchers wrote. “Administrative data can be used to study pediatric [community-acquired pneumonia] hospitalizations, although the study population must be carefully defined and the specificity of the diagnosis understood to ensure valid study conclusions.”
The multicenter, retrospective study included “998 medical records of a possible 3,646 discharges with a pneumonia-related ICD-9-CMdischarge code and 1,000 without a pneumonia-related discharge code,” the researchers wrote.
Among pneumonia-related discharge codes, researchers found that 67.8% were classified as provider confirmed community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and 80.5% were classified as definite CAP. For provider-confirmed participants, sensitivity ranged from 60.7% to 99.7% and specificity ranged from 75.7% to 96.4%, and for definite CAP, sensitivity ranged from 65.6% to 99.6% and specificity ranged from 68.7% to 93%.
“We have demonstrated that administrative data is a valuable tool for studying pediatric CAP and provide several strategies that reliably identify this population,” researchers wrote. “Application of these validated algorithms allow for a more accurate identification of relevant and comparable patient populations for research and performance improvement purposes. Understanding the strengths and limitations of these data, as well as the uncertainty occasionally associated with diagnosing CAP, will help ensure valid study conclusions.”
Disclosure: The study was funded in part by NIH through Vanderbilt Clinical and Translational Research Scholars Program and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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