Agreement between referral information and discharge diagnoses according to Norwegian elective treatment guidelines – a cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND: Norway introduced 32 priority guidelines for elective health treatment in the specialist health service in the period 2008–9. The guidelines were intended to reduce large differences in waiting times among hospitals, streamline referrals and ensure that patients accessed the necessary healthcare to which they were entitled for certain conditions. Referral information guided the priorities. As the referral information was key to future evaluation of the guidelines, this study validates the referral information in hospital patient records against discharge diagnoses, because only the discharge diagnosis is recorded in the Norwegian Patient Register (NPR) database, which is used in the main evaluation. METHODS: Of the specific conditions from 10 priority guidelines, 20 were selected for review for the period 2008–9 at 4 hospitals in Norway. The ICD-10 diagnoses per disease or condition were given in retrospect by clinicians who participated in the expert groups developing the priority guidelines. Reasons for deviations between referral information and discharge diagnoses were coded into four categories, according to the degree of precision of the former compared with the latter. RESULTS: In all, 1854 medical records were available for review. The diagnostic precision of the referrals differed significantly between hospitals, and across the 2 years 2008 and 2009. The overall sensitivity was 0.93 (95% confidence interval 0.92–0.94). For the separate conditions, sensitivity was in the range 0.60–1.00. Experience showed that it was necessary to pay careful attention to the selection of ICD-10 diagnoses for identifying patients. The medical records of psychiatry patients were unavailable in some cases and for certain conditions some were unavailable after use of our record extraction algorithm. CONCLUSION: The sensitivity of the referral information on diagnosis or condition was high compared with the discharge diagnosis for the 20 selected conditions from the 10 priority guidelines. Although the review assessed a limited number of the total, we consider the results sufficiently representative and, hence, they will allow use of the NPR data for analyses of the introduction and follow-up of the 32 priority guidelines.