IJERPH, Vol. 17, Pages 521: Usability of Clinical Information in Discharge Summary Data in the Diagnosis Procedure Combination Survey for Cancer Patients (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health)

Valid data are required to monitor and measure the quality of cancer treatment. This study aims to assess the usability of diagnosis procedure combination (DPC) survey discharge description data. DPC survey data were analyzed by linking them to the hospital-based cancer registries (HBCR) from 231 hospitals. We focused on patients who were aged 20 years or older and diagnosed in 2013 with stomach, colorectal, liver, lung, or breast cancer. We assessed the percentage of unknown/missing values in supplementary data for patients with five common cancers and compared DPC cancer stage information to that of HBCR. In total, 279,451 discharge data sets for 180,399 patients were analyzed. The percentages of unknown data for smoking index and height/weight were 10.5% and 2.3%, respectively, and varied from 0.0% to 93.0% between hospitals. In the activity of daily living component, the rates of missing data for climbing stairs (3.6%) and bathing (2.9%) at admission were slightly higher than for other elements. Unexpectedly low concordance rate of tumor, node, and metastasis classification between DPC survey and HBCR data was observed as 80.6%, which means 20.4% of the data showed discrepancies. The usability of DPC survey discharge description data is generally acceptable, but some variables had substantial amounts of missing values.