Introduction: The excessive consumption of alcohol is detrimental to long term health and increases the likelihood of hospital admission. However, definitions of alcohol-related hospital admission vary, giving rise to uncertainty in the effect of alcohol on alcohol-related health care utilization.
Objectives: To compare diagnostic codes on hospital admission and discharge and to determine the ideal combination of codes necessary for an accurate determination of alcohol-related hospital admission.
Methods: Routine population-linked e-cohort data were extracted from the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank containing all alcohol-related hospital admissions (n,= 92,553) from 2006 to 2011 in Wales, United Kingdom. The distributions of the diagnostic codes recorded at admission and discharge were compared. By calculating a misclassification rate (sensitivity-like measure) the appropriate number of coding fields to examine for alcohol-codes was established.
Results: There was agreement between admission and discharge codes. When more than ten coding fields were used the misclassification rate was less than 1%.
Conclusion: With the data at present and alcohol-related codes used, codes recorded at admission and discharge can be used equivalently to identify alcohol-related admissions. The appropriate number of coding fields to examine was established: fewer than ten is likely to lead to under-reporting of alcohol-related admissions. The methods developed here can be applied to other medical conditions that can be described using a certain set of diagnostic codes, each of which can be a known sole cause of the condition and recorded in multiple positions in e-cohort data.
Keywords: ICD-10 codes; alcohol; e-cohort data; hospital admission; optimisation.