(1) Center for Health Care Evaluation (MPD:152), VA Palo Alto Health Care System, 795 Willow Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA
Abstract:
Background
Strategies to accurately identify the occurrence of specific health care events in administrative data is central to many quality improvement and research efforts. Many health care quality measures have treatment identification strategies based on diagnosis and procedure codes - an approach that is inexpensive and feasible but usually of unknown validity. In this study, we examined if the diagnosis/procedure code combinations used in the 2006 HEDIS Initiation and Engagement quality measures to identify instances of addiction treatment have high concordance with documentation of addiction treatment in clinical progress notes.