International Journal of Emergency Mental Health and Human Resilience
Open Access

Editorial

Accuracy of ICD Codes for Persons with Considerable Emergency Department Use for Mental Health Complaints

Amanda D Vandyk^1*, Ian D Graham^2,3, Elizabeth G VanDenKerkhof^4,5, Margaret B Harrison^6,7

¹School of Nursing, University of Ottawa, 451 Smyth Rd., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

²Epidemiology and Community Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

³Centre for Practice-Changing Research, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

⁴School Nursing and Dept of Anesthesiology & Perioperative Medicine Career Investigator, OWHC/CIHR

⁵Practice and Research in Nursing Group, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

⁶Emerita, School of Nursing, Ontario, Canada

⁷Queen's Joanna Briggs Collaboration, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

*Corresponding Author:

Amanda D Vandyk
E-mail: Amanda.Vandyk@uottawa.ca

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is the standard diagnostic tool for clinical, health management, and research purposes, put forth by the World Health Organization. Currently in its 10th version, ICD-11 is expected to release in 2017. Researchers use ICD codes to identify participants for clinical studies and to track healthcare utilization rates, among a variety of other purposes (e.g. to study access, quality, costs, and effectiveness of care, patient comorbidities, incidence of complications, morbidity, and mortality) (O’Malley et al., 2005). Clearly, code accuracy is paramount and existing priorities include assessing diagnostic congruence of ICD codes and medical records (De Coster et al., 2006). From the emerging evidence, we see that at least two ICD codes are needed to accurately identify individuals with confirmed chronic conditions (Goldberg et al., 2013). Yet, researchers continue to use single ICD codes to identify study participants (Krueger et al., 2011).