PS3-22: HMORN VDW Mortality QA: Evaluating Completeness and Consistency of Death and Cause of Death Data

摘要

Background/AimsPatient mortality data is a critical component of health research data, especially where death is a clinical outcome of interest. Mortality data is also important for cohort selection and to avoid communications with families of deceased patients. The HMORN Virtual Data Warehouse (VDW) has a DEATH file and a CAUSE OF DEATH file that contain data on whether a patient is dead or alive, date of death, confidence of death status, and causes of death. VDW mortality data is synthesized from multiple sources, such as state death certificates, federal data, and health plan utilization and membership data. These sources are combined using complex, probabilistic algorithms. There is variation in both source data and the transformation logic used by sites. This poses potential challenges for researchers to derive accurate results from multi-site studies. Our aim is to measure the quality of VDW mortality data across HMORN sites, highlight areas of consistency and variation, report issues for remediation, and identify opportunities to improve data specifications and guidelines.