We rely heavily on the dates of admission and discharge from the hospital, since, in determining the "validity" of the MDS discharge destination of hospital, we examine both the exact date match of the MDS discharge date and the Medicare hospital claim admission date.
The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of C trachomatis and N gonorrhoeae among antenatal care attendees in Botswana, and to assess the validity of the 'vaginal discharge syndrome and lower abdominal pain' algorithm in the diagnosis of cervicitis in pregnancy.
Moreover, another limitation of our study depends on the lack of standardized post-discharge surveillance methodologies, which could affect the validity of the post-discharge SSI rate.
The source of data is important, because Lee et al. found that the validity of hospital discharge data was insufficient to get the incidence for several cancer diagnoses [ 5].
This large study suggests that coder characteristics do not influence the validity of hospital discharge data.
Overall, our results suggest that these coder characteristics do not influence the validity of hospital discharge data.
Our results suggest that coder characteristics do not influence the validity of hospital discharge data and that coding can be remarkably consistent.
Similar results were reported in another study that assessed the validity of hospital discharge data for identifying diabetes-complicated births (25).
First, it was based on secondary data; therefore it has limitations with regard to the validity of the principal diagnosis at discharge and the level of completeness of some of the important variables, such as home address, which limit the georeferencing of a large number of cases.
The validity of discharge diagnoses registered in the Danish National Patient Registry is variable but is generally high for the diseases included in the CCI [ 25].
Although 32 priority guidelines had been implemented, only 10 were found to be feasible for a study estimating the validity of discharge diagnoses recorded in the NPR (Table 1).
