Abstract
Background:Despite the importance of the hospital discharge destination field ("discharge code" hereafter) for research and payment reform, its accuracy is not well established.Objectives:The aim of this study was to examine the accuracy of discharge codes in Medicare claims.Data Sources:2012-2015 Medicare claims of knee and hip replacement patients.Research Design:We identified patients' discharge location in claims and compared it with the discharge code. We also used a mixed-effects logistic regression to examine the association of patient and hospital characteristics with discharge code accuracy.Results:Approximately 9% of discharge codes were inaccurate. Long-term care hospital discharge codes had the lowest accuracy rate (41%), followed by acute care transfers (72%), inpatient rehabilitation facility (80%), and home discharges (83%). Most misclassifications occurred within 2 broad groups of postacute care settings: Home-based and institutional care. The odds of inaccurate discharge codes were higher for Medicaid-enrolled patients and safety-net and low-volume hospitals.Conclusions:Inaccurate hospital discharge coding may have introduced bias in studies relying on these codes (eg, evaluations of Medicare bundled payment models). Inaccuracy was more common among Medicaid-enrolled patients and safety-net and low-volume hospitals, suggesting more potential bias in existing study findings pertaining to these patients and hospitals.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 491-495 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Medical care |
Volume | 58 |
Issue number | 5 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - May 1 2020 |
Keywords
- Medicare
- administrative data uses
- health economics
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health