Computerized Definitions Showed High Positive Predictive Values for Identifying Reasons for Hospitalizations in a Medicaid Population with Rheumatoid Arthritis. Effective Health Care Research Report No. 7

摘要

Computerized definitions are used to identify serious infections and congestive heart failure leading to hospitalizations in studies of medication safety. However, information on their accuracy is limited. The authors evaluated the ability of computerized definitions to identify these conditions among patients diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Medical charts were randomly selected from a systematic sample of hospitalizations identified in a cohort of Medicaid patients with rheumatoid arthritis. We calculated positive predictive values (PPV) for computerized definitions for community-acquired pneumonia, invasive pneumococcal disease, sepsis, opportunistic mycoses and congestive heart failure using charts reviews as gold standard and computed inter-reviewer agreement statistics.