Assessing the quality of medical death certification: a case study of concordance between national statistics and results from a medical record review in a regional hospital in the Philippines

BACKGROUND: Medical certificates of cause of death (MCCOD) issued by hospital physicians are a key input to vital registration systems. Deaths certified by hospital physicians have been implicitly considered to be of high quality, but recent evidence suggests otherwise. We conducted a medical record review (MRR) of hospital MCCOD in the Philippines and compared the cause of death concordance with certificates coded by the Philippines Statistics Authority (PSA). METHODS: MCCOD for adult deaths in Bohol Regional Hospital (BRH) in 2007–2008 and 2011 were collected and reviewed by a team of study physicians. Corresponding MCCOD coded by the PSA were linked by a hospital identifier. The study physicians wrote a new MCCOD using the patient medical record, noted the quality of the medical record to produce a cause of death, and indicated whether it was necessary to change the underlying cause of death (UCOD). Chance-corrected concordance, cause-specific mortality fraction (CSMF) accuracy, and chance-corrected CSMF were used to examine the concordance between the MRR and PSA. RESULTS: A total of 1052 adult deaths were linked between the MRR and PSA. Median chance-corrected concordance was 0.73, CSMF accuracy was 0.85, and chance-corrected CSMF accuracy was 0.58. 74.8% of medical records were deemed to be of high enough quality to assign a cause of death, yet study physicians indicated that it was necessary to change the UCOD in 41% of deaths, 82% of which required addition of a new UCOD. CONCLUSIONS: Medical records were generally of sufficient quality to assign a cause of death and concordance between the PSA and MRR was reasonably high, suggesting that routine mortality statistics data are reasonably accurate for describing population level causes of death in Bohol. While overall agreement between the PSA and MRR in major cause groups was sufficient for public health purposes, improvements in death certification practices are recommended to help physicians differentiate between treatable (immediate) COD and COD that are important for public health surveillance. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12963-018-0178-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.