Daniel P. Lorence
Abstract
With physicians, information managers, and payers all influencing health care data classification, data can end up as an injured party. This hurts all of us, as reimbursement levels and error analysis increasingly rely on coded and classified data.
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Index Terms
- The perils of data misreporting
Recommendations
Analysis of ordinal longitudinal data under nonignorable missingness and misreporting: An application to Alzheimer’s disease study
AbstractIn many epidemiological and clinical studies, observations on individuals are recorded longitudinally on a Likert-type scale. In the process of recording, or due to some other causes, a proportion of outcomes and time-dependent ...
Reviews
John M. Artz
The results of a national survey of medical records managers on the topic of patient data misreporting are presented in this paper. The study suggests that "a large degree of misreporting of patient data exists across the US." This misreporting results in both under-reimbursement and over-reimbursement of a patient's actual expenses. According to the paper, the source of the problem is "a lack of consistent classification," and "inaccurately classified medical information." This is entirely believable, since incorrect classification of data is a problem throughout database and information systems applications. And yet while the author's claims are probably true, they are not supported by the study. The study had three troubling aspects. First, the author claims there is "a large degree of misreporting," yet between 85 and 95 percent of the respondents reported less than five percent reporting errors. Second, only records managers were surveyed, and they may have personal interests that could call the validity of the data into question. Third, assuming that all of the records managers were scrupulously honest, they may not actually have known the answers to questions about misreporting. Records managers are not content specialists, and are likely to be aware of only those cases of misreporting that are brought to their attention. Therefore, while the author's conclusions are likely to be correct, they are hard to justify based on this study. Online Computing Reviews Service
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